After months of negotiations, the European Parliament adopted on 14 September a resolution dedicated to combating the phenomenon known as social dumping. It is the report itself that for the first time at European level provides an official definition. The language is formal, but the meaning explicit:

[social dumping] covers a wide range of intentionally abusive practices (…) that allow the development of unfair competition by illegally reducing operating and labour-related costs and give rise to violations of workers' rights and to their exploitation.

Social dumping in everyday life

A practical example is the posting of workers within the EU, a legal mechanism that allows a European company to place one of its employees at the disposal of another. But its application can give rise to abuses. It was in this way, for instance, that a French journalism team discovered, on a building site in northern France, the presence of Romanian workers employed by an Italian subcontractor and paid less than the local statutory minimum wage. Another French construction giant was caught doing business with a temporary employment agency registered in Ireland but based in Cyprus, which supplied it with Polish or Portuguese workers at extremely low cost. But social dumping is not exclusive to the construction sector. Cases also abound in transport. The workers who drive the lorries that cross the continent every day — the so-called cabotage — are posted workers, and so are the pilots of well-known airlines.

A paradox at the heart of the single market

Social dumping stems from a paradox entirely internal to the European Union, as Guillaume Balas, the French Socialist MEP who authored the report underpinning the parliament's position, explained to his colleagues. While the creation of a single market has allowed the free movement of goods, capital and people across borders, each member state has retained its own social standards. The result is that when companies found themselves competing in the single market, some seized the opportunity offered by free movement to recruit the best professionals, while others instead focused on reducing labour costs and worsening working conditions.

Blacklists and minimum wages to put a stop to social dumping

The document approved by the Parliament puts forward a long list of measures for the Commission. Some are straightforward, such as the creation of a blacklist of companies guilty of serious violations of European social and labour legislation, so as to exclude them from public contracts and subsidies. Others are far more radical and strike at the root of the imbalances within the Union. Among these is the introduction of national minimum wages that gradually reach "at least 60 per cent of the respective average wage." This is also a call directed at Italy to speed up the process of introducing a minimum wage.