The discussion on the revision of the coordination rules of unemployment benefits – a battlefield between East and West

Abstract

<jats:p> Unemployment benefits are a special type of benefit for coordination purposes since Member States exporting benefits tend to fear that supervision of their benefit recipients in the host State will not be satisfactory. For this reason, several complicated rules have been made, which are disadvantageous for the benefit recipients living in a country with low unemployment benefits who last worked in a country with higher benefits. The rules are also disadvantageous for countries with many outgoing frontier workers. Although the proposal for revising the Regulation includes new rules to address these problems, the large differences in interests between Member States make it difficult to reach a compromise. </jats:p>

Free movement and access to social security in the EU: The challenge of exporting unemployment benefits

“…10 To achieve this, it was proposed that Article 55(4) be added to the Implementing Regulation, ensuring that a) the Member State providing the unemployment benefit is informed when the EU worker has registered with the employment services of the host state; b) if anything is affecting the entitlements to benefits, the host Member State sends the relevant information to the Member State providing the employment benefit and the person concerned; and c) the Member State providing the unemployment benefit can request information every month if the workers are complying with organised checking procedures. As it was considered the cause of too much work for the host states, sentence b) was deleted from the compromise proposal in Spring 2019 (Pennings, 2020b: 160). Even with these additional requirements in the proposed Implementing Regulations, Member States were not convinced that these measures would ensure that persons seek work.…”

“…Pennings (2020b: 160) argues that even with these additional requirements in the reform proposal, it is understandable that some Member States are not convinced that these will ensure that the unemployed are seeking work. Difficulties are that the host state has to apply its own legislation, which might have different conditions than those in the competent state.…”

“…Difficulties are that the host state has to apply its own legislation, which might have different conditions than those in the competent state. Further, given the heterogeneity in wages between Member States, incentives to search for work are low when exporting benefits from a country with high benefit levels to one with low salaries (Pennings, 2020b: 160), as in the case of the workers exporting their benefits from the Netherlands to Poland.…”

“…Member States can voluntarily extend this period to a maximum of six months. In the proposal for a revision, the European Commission suggested making the export of six months mandatory 4 (Pennings, 2020b: 158), but policymakers in several Western European states vehemently refused. To explain this resistance, the next section introduces institutional approaches that clarify the positions of policymakers.…”

The role and limits of European social security coordination in guaranteeing migrants social benefits

“… 31. For an in-depth analysis of this proposal and the ongoing negotiations on it, see: Pennings (2020a:149-154). …”