France: Macron battles Poland on EU labor reforms

link: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-centraleurope-idUSKCN1B5128

Let’s get away from the mess here for a while, and look at a difficult situation somewhere else 🙂

French President Macron has stepped up criticism of Poland’s illiberal and openly anti-immigrant government. The issues at stake – protection of domestic labor in Western europe, free movement of labor from Eastern Europe, and the who should bear the burden of absorbing migrants from the disastrous Libya/Syria regime change efforts — those are some of the most contentious items separating the wealthier and poorer EU countries.

Macron is pushing to gain approval for updates to rules governing temporary workers, essentially to counteract the labor cost advantage that Eastern European temporary workers have in Western Europe.

The first level of irony, which I’m sure is not lost on anyone there, is that the eastern euro countries resisted quotas for migrants from Libya and Syria. The second level is that regime change efforts in those countries (creating the migrant wave), were heartily supported by France. Last but not least, the change pushed by Macron would move the rules in a direction that is effectively protectionist, from the perspective of the wealthier EU countries. Thus he is going against the supposedly sacrosanct free movement of labor. It almost sounds like something his conservative political opponents might like, rather than something you would expect from a former liberal economic minister.