Gabriela Creţu (PSE), in writing. – (RO) I would like to make a clarification. Workers from the eastern part of the European Union are not engaged in and do not want social dumping. They are not the ones who want to sell themselves cheaply. Unfortunately, the costs of revamping and redeveloping the workforce are comparable in both the east and west. Some costs are even higher in Romania than in other areas, but the bills need to be paid here too.

Responsibility for creating this precarious situation on the labour market and for making working conditions worse in the European Union does not lie with the workers, but with those exerting the maximum pressure possible in order to abolish the existing guarantees under labour law, with a single objective in mind: to maximise profits by any means, including through sacrificing all the values and principles which we regard as the shared benefits gained by Europe’s societies.

It is our duty in this case to protect the entitlement of workers from Eastern Europe to enjoy a fundamental right: equal pay for equal work. Socialists and trade-unions, primarily, need to avoid creating a false, artificial division within the group of those who can achieve these rights only if they maintain solidarity. They do not have any other clout apart from solidarity.