Dear Ms Barkalaia,

I hope you are healthy and well in these continuously challenging times. I was happy to learn that among other progressing issues, the draft Employment Service Act is going to be submitted to the Parliament soon, as indicated by Ms Kiladze to the Head of Delegation. In this context I regret and would like to apologize that collecting the EU feedback on this piece of legislation took exceptionally long time. However, I hope that the proposals I am sharing now can still be incorporated in the final version. Please also be aware that the TA team are ready to provide their full support in this regard.

Overall, the draft law contains all key elements needed, while comments mainly concern formulations, definitions and call for more clarity on some aspects:

Firstly, the TA project team did a great job and provided detailed comments (see attached), which our colleagues in the DG Employment and ETF fully agreed on.

Secondly, some comments were provided by our DG NEAR colleagues in the draft law document attached.

Thirdly, DG Employment besides concerns regarding the definitions provided also some links and information for your reference (please see below).

I would like to note that all these comments were made to the draft law unofficial translation to English, therefore, there might be some translation related misinterpretations. We also fully understand that it is up to you and other Georgian responsible bodies to decide on the final version of the document.

I would also appreciate receiving a short update on the next steps/plans regarding this draft law.

Kind regards,
Jurate

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DG Employment informal feedback:

A general point underlined by all (experts and ETF) is the rather approximative terms used in the draft. This might have partly to do with the quality of the English translation but would certainly be a priority issue for the Ministry to address in view of the final draft they will submit to the Parliament.

As you know, the substance of this draft law is not regulated by EU legal acquis. However, there are internationally agreed definitions, standards, taxonomies (eg ILO convention 88 on employment services, OECD on active measures etc.), and the draft should be better aligned on these.

Moreover – the experts are certainly aware of these sources – a number of documents are available on the Europa webpages that describe EU MS “good practices”, and could be helpful to improve the concepts and definitions, for example:

on Public Employment Services

https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=105&langId=en

On the  quality of ALMPs :

https://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=21872&langId=en

from the EU PES Network and its knowledge centre :

https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1100&langId=en

Also attached a document from the PES Network.