Mr. Nicolas Schmit:

On the more general points, we are all in diverse economies. I come from a country whose situation is not so different from Ireland's. We have thriving sectors that pay fairly high wages. Our public sector must also pay good wages because otherwise nobody would want to work in it and the public sector needs qualified people. We also have SMEs, whose situations differ greatly. Agriculture is another issue. Farmers deserve to have a decent income. In that sense, my response is that one size certainly does not fit all. We have to take this diversity into account. However, it is clear that, in our society, there must be some kind of ground floor of social rights and a minimum wage to which everybody has to adapt. Otherwise, nobody would ever go to work in an SME or in the hospitality sector as they would not be paid enough to allow for a decent standard of living. I was a minister for labour. By the way, yesterday I had a meeting with the president of SMEunited and we discussed these issues. SMEs are the driving force in our economy and they are also largely job creators but, if their standards are very far away from the minimum standards people expect, they will not get the skilled people and those who really want to participate in a more innovative economy. You have to find the right balance. I agree that you cannot just say that big companies and all others must be treated exactly the same but there must be a floor with regard to social protection, wages and so on.

There must also be a possibility for people working in SMEs to retrain, because that is another issue. There is a great need for SMEs to retrain, reskill and upskill their people because, as we have seen with the Covid pandemic - and even independently of the pandemic because it really just accelerated the issue - SMEs have to digitalise and modernise. If you are a shopkeeper, you have to be more digitalised than ever. Especially during the Covid pandemic, many shops tried to digitalise overnight to sell their products through the Internet and so on. To do that as a small entrepreneur, you yourself have to reskill. That was one of the messages I got yesterday from SMEunited. It told me that we always talk about the workers but that we must also talk about the small entrepreneurs as they also have to reskill. I fully agree with that. As to how this can be done, for example, through subsidies or tax credits, I am favour of doing it through any means possible. It is up to member states to find the right approach to further promote education, training and skilling through the most adaptive instruments because what they do in respect of big companies should be different from what they do for SMEs.

I will finish on the matter of subcontracting. This is an issue. It shows that we also have to do something to create level playing fields. If there are new formulas whereby you can hire people and refuse them all sorts of social rights and wage levels, that will develop and an economy will be created wherein people do exactly the same work but do not have these rights.

This is something we have to look at. The platform economy is an example, but that exists in other places. In that sense, it is attractive because you can create your own platform, not pay people correctly, and say you are not a member of my staff, you are just a self-employed person working for me or providing me with services, so I will just pay you for the service and I do not care about all the rest. This is a problem for the whole economy and for the financing of the social system and leads to inequality between people.