Czech Business Today

The Blue Card (The Directive on the Conditions of entry and residence of non-EU nationals for the purposes of highly skilled employment) was adopted in 2009. Since then the directive should have attracted highly qualified workers from around the word, should have challenged the EU labour market bottlenecks and should have supported competitiveness and economic growth.

However, the Blue Card has not come up to expectations and has showed many imperfections. The European Commission sees the reason for that in huge variety of similar national schemes for attracting qualified and talented workers from third countries. The June Commission proposal for revision of the directive that should tackle the shortcomings and broaden its scope is based on abolishing these national schemes. That created negative reactions from the majority of member states that would want to keep negotiating forever. Many national parliaments (including the Czech one) have already issued yellow cards for breaking the subsidiarity principle and won’t be held back even by the recent non-success in the case of Posting of Workers directive. At the same time, this wave of concentrated resistance against the Blue Card has put shadow on many improvements that could have turned it, combined with national schemes and various EU schemes for intercompany movement of workers or for seasonal workers, into a legitimate migration tool and cover the changing needs of companies operating in the EU.

Employers also strongly disagree with the idea of cancelling the national schemes. Contrary to national governments, however, they think that even if there are issues with the principle of subsidiarity, all the flexible points of the proposal that is discussed in the Council that will broaden the scope of people applying for the Blue Card, increase their mobility among the EU, make the wages criteria more flexible, enable recognition of professional qualifications as alternative to school qualifications, fasten and make the procedures more effective and enable easier access of companies to highly qualified workers.

The business community supports the principle of proportionality and thinks that with certain minor adjustments, the proposal of the Blue Card directive will comply with the principle. Vladimíra Drbalová, Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic.