"This is a Europe of citizens", stresses EFFAT General-Secretary Harald Wiedenhofer, and the "new forms of employment created by the Commission through these proposed directives in their current form are an invitation to carry out social dumping and endanger the results that were achieved with such hard work when creating the European Social Model. Opening up and liberalising the European labour market before the crisis was one thing, but doing this now, when the EU is facing high levels of unemployment, it has so many difficulties in organising its own intra-EU migrants and it is facing more and more precarious work and poverty is on the increase, is quite another. It is simply not the right way forward, as it does not represent the best interests of Europeans.

"All European trade unions welcome the admission of workers from non-EU countries (‘third countries’) to the European labour market, but we cannot and will not accept discrimination against third-country workers. Therefore, it is extremely important that the Single Permit, Seasonal Workers and ICT Directives safeguard the equal treatment and equal rights of all workers. These proposed directives do not provide sufficient guarantees and contain legal and practical loopholes."

Moreover, due to the serious concerns about social dumping throughout the EU and the growing acts of discrimination and xenophobia against migrants to the EU and mobile workers, we urge the EU institutions to focus on these issues and safeguard the European citizens’ agenda. The absolute minimum that must be done to ensure this is to renounce an approach to migration that involves a two-tier system, include all the categories of workers (and specifically the seasonal workers from non-EU countries) in the Single Permit Directive, have minimum standards for all seasonal workers regardless of their origin and ensure that preventive and sanctions provisions are sufficiently robust to avert unfair competition and discrimination.