European Diary: The colourful blue and orange posters advertising 2006 as the "European Year of Workers' Mobility" are plastered all around the Brussels metro.
The official launch of the campaign was yesterday, when European Commission president José Manuel Barroso opened a two-day conference entitled "Workers' Mobility: a right, an option, and an opportunity?"
The EU is planning to spend €10 million in 2006 to popularise the concept of moving states to take up employment through a series of job fairs, advertisements and a new website that publishes every job advert across the EU posted by a national employment agencies such as FAS.
The Eures website, which can be accessed online at http://europa.eu.int/eures/home.jsp?land=en, translates the one million or so job advertisements available on the site into all 20 official EU languages to help overcome one of the biggest obstacles to moving in the EU, language barriers.
"We find many people are not aware of their entitlement to move across the EU to work. The language barrier is also one of the biggest challenges to workers' mobility," says Jérôme Vignon, director in the commission's employment directorate. "Housing is also an issue."
Just 2 per cent of people of working age currently live in an EU country other than their country of origin. But a new survey shows citizens like the idea of moving.
The Eurobarometer survey shows that 53 per cent of Europeans associate the EU with the "freedom to travel and work abroad". Irish citizens are the most positive in the EU about working abroad, with 68 per cent of people saying that long-distance mobility is a "good thing". The Danes are ranked second, with 64 per cent in favour of mobility", while just 22 per cent of Cypriots and 27 per cent of Greeks are positive.
Even though we enjoy the freedom to travel and work abroad, few Irish people are ready to take the plunge.
Just a quarter of Irish citizens would be prepared to move to another EU country to take a job if they were unemployed at home, the second-lowest survey score. About 50 per cent of Poles and Lithuanians say they would be willing to move to escape the high rates of unemployment that they experience at home.
But for many Poles and Lithuanians moving within the EU is still barred by law, highlighting an irony that threatens to spoil the "European Year of Workers' Mobility".
Under transitional arrangements agreed when the EU enlarged from 15 to 25 members in May 2004, a dozen old EU states have maintained restrictions on migrant workers from east Europe. So far, Spain and Finland are the only two countries to indicate that they will lift the barriers to "freedom of labour" mobility in May - the second anniversary of enlargement when states must reapply to the commission if they want to maintain barriers on workers from the eight east European states.
Fearful of a deluge of foreign workers into their economies, which are already struggling with unemployment, states such as France, Germany and Italy are almost certain to apply to maintain restrictions.
This reluctance to remove the restrictions on east European citizens' "working mobility" is causing some new member states to complain that they are second-class citizens. The "Visegrad Four", which comprises the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, accused states of keeping restrictions for political reasons.
The fear of the "Polish plumber" was also evident during last week's vote in the European Parliament on the services directive - a piece of EU legislation that proposes to liberalise the EU services market.
The directive proposes to enable an EU firm based in one country to set up in another state without encountering the barrage of legal and bureaucratic hurdles that currently make doing business abroad difficult.
After several days of political horse-trading a deal was finally cobbled together by the two biggest factions in the parliament, the Socialists and the centre-right EPP-ED. But more than 30 French Socialist MEPs voted against the compromise directive, fearing it could enable firms from eastern Europe to set up in France and undercut local firms. But for many of the new EU states, the bill is now too weak and represents another example of "old Europe's" reluctance to view them as equal partners in the EU project.
"It is nothing other than killing the directive without dropping its name," complained Hungarian MEP József Szájer in a letter to the Financial Times last week.
Under the compromise directive, member states will still be able to shelter some service sectors - public services, transport, private security and gambling - from competition from overseas service providers. States will also be able to cite environmental and public policy factors reasons for maintaining trade barriers.
So, while the concept of workers' mobility may be a good one, it is clearly an idea that will take more than a year of posters and conferences to take off in "old Europe".