French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced the decision on 13 March 2006, following a meeting of the country's inter-ministerial committee on Europe. "The French government will proceed to a step-by-step controlled lifting of restrictions to the free movement of paid workers from eight countries which joined the EU in 2004," de Villepin said in a press release. "The lifting of these measures will first of all concern a number of professions which have difficulties recruiting people. The details of ending the restrictions will be discussed with the social partners."
These talks will have to be ended within a matter of weeks, since France will have to communicate its future policy on workers' mobility to the Commission before 1 May 2006, when the transitory measures barring workers from Poland, the Baltic countries, the Czech and the Slovak Republics, Hungary and Slovenia from offering their services in the EU will run out. Talks are not expected to be very difficult though, because French trade unions (with the sole exceptions of the Christian trade union CFTC and the CFE-CGC, a trade union for management staff) are almost unanimously in favour of lifting the restrictions immediately.
The French announcement was made following a plea by Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom to end the restrictions and a few weeks after the Commission published its report on workers' mobility, which said those countries which have not put the restrictions into place have profited economically. The measures can be extended for another three-year period until May 2009 and a two-year period following that, but all restrictions to workers' mobility will have to end by 1 May 2011.
