The new licensing rules will remain an ineffective step until each state enacts the legislation/policy that requires that the new European Commission regulation is adopted by the local ATC providers.
I'm not sure I understand this. The new 'rules' are actually an EC Regulation (no 805/2011). For EU Member States at least, the regulation does not need to be enacted at State level - it's just law. And, broadly speaking, it overrides any national legislation that may be in place.
If you are saying that everyone in the EU has to start following the rules before it has any effect, well, I guess that is true. But it shouldn't be a problem because the regulation effectively says the same as the ATCO Directive did (and which EU Member States had to transpose into their national law). The provisions in the Directive related to licensing and approval of training providers had to be put into national law by May 2008 - the bit about language endorsements had to be in place a couple of years later. With just a couple of exceptions, all EU Member States had transposed the Directive by May 2008 or very soon after.
So, in fact, very little has changed because of these new EASA rules....although you could be forgiven for thinking that EASA had re-invented sliced bread if you read their Press Release.
Has it made it easier for ATCOs to move around? The answer is, probably, a little, maybe. Certainly there are a few ATCOs working in countries that they didn't get their licence from, but whether this was made possible by the Directive is probably debatable. Whilst the European Commission may have managed to achieve 'increased mobility of the ATCO workforce' through the Directive - and now the new regulation - it has effectively blocked entry to the European region for controllers whose licenses were issued outside the EU. Anyone in this position, no matter how many years of experience or whatever that they may have, now seems to have to go back and start from
ab-initio training in order to work in the EU.
As to controllers' pay, there's always been downward pressure on pay, as there is for most other occupations, but ultimately market forces will surely win out. The demand for controllers forecast by ANSPs - which is based on the eternally optimistic expectations of the benefits of automation and, now, SESAR, which bears an increasing similarity to a great white elephant as each day passes - and for which they (the ANSPs) are training is substantially lower than that predicted by controllers and their unions and associations. The reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle; if I had to guess, it will be somewhere far closer to the controllers' estimates. If that is the case in just a few years a controller with a bit of experience and the necessary skills, including, importantly, useful language proficiencies will be able to name his/her price.
Indeed, this seems almost to bring us full circle. One of the Commission's principal reasons for creating FABs is to increase efficiency and to contribute to reducing costs. Strangely, in my view anyway, the Commission has not done all this to reduce controllers salaries. It's the ANSPs that want to do that. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose......the being a European thread and all that.