Labour market reform and Visegrad countries: Deep rooted concerns and how to address them

Alena Kudzko, as part of the project Think Visegrad, published a policy brief concerning the ongoing labour market reforms in the EU and recommends steps to be taken for the CEE countries, not to end on the economic and political periphery of Europe.

Issues of labour mobility and labour markets have been among the most contentious discussions on the crowded EU agenda of the past couple years. Proposals calling for reform of the regulations on posted workers and for the enhancement of social rights, advocated primarily by Western countries - including most notably France - and the EU Commission, have been accompanied by both domestic and EU-wide squabbling. Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) have often found themselves on the defensive, seeking at once to both fend off accusations of “social dumping” and foil the undesired reforms. They fear that some of the proposals on labour reform fail to coincide with their economic interests and the principle of the free market, or perceive them as an encroachment of the EU Commission on national competencies

The coordination of the social and labour agenda has been challenging for the V4, as it has been for the entire EU with the purported East-West divide, due to conflicting political preferences and unequal positions of dependency on the Eurozone reform agenda in the first place. There has, nevertheless, been a shared Visegrad perspective involving at a minimum caution and concern with respect to the overall direction of the reforms. The curtailing of the freedom of movement of labour and services and harmonization of the social agenda at the EU level are particularly viewed as posing significant risks. At least to a certain degree, V4 countries have expressed a common concern that higher social standards and the upward reform of labour regulations to match those in Western countries will precipitate the loss of their competitive advantage and an unsustainable burden on national budgets. 

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