Memorandum by Trades Union Congress (TUC)
1. The Trades Union Congress is the voice
of Britain at work. Representing nearly 6.5 million workers in
over 60 unions, the TUC seeks to raise the quality of working
life and promote equality for all. Our members work in manufacturing
and services, and in the public, private and voluntary sectors.
2. The TUC welcomes the European Union Committee's
initiative to inquire into the Commission's 2007 legislative and
work programme. The TUC will not attempt to comment on all parts
of what is a very wide-ranging programme but will instead seek
to make some key points.
3. First, the TUC welcomes the idea of a
detailed public work programme resulting from extensive consultations.
However, there would be overall benefit if the EU had just one
work programme, rather than two potentially competing ones—that
of the Commission and those of the successive Council presidencies.
The decision taken in the context of the now stalled Constitutional
Treaty to abolish the six-monthly rotating Council presidencies,
though no longer operational, might indicate that there would
be support for a system whereby the Commission proposed and the
Council and Parliament adopted a single, EU, work programme. This
should be tried.
4. Secondly, there is a need for greater
coherence between the Commission's—or ideally the EU's—work
programme and national priorities. A December 2006 European Economic
and Social Committee opinion ("EU and national administration
practice and linkages") records that in the overall EU decision-making
process the role of national implementation has been neglected—by
both the political and academic worlds. The TUC has the impression
however that in a number of countries governmental priorities
and strategies make little if any reference to European ones.
The Commission says that member states (and other European institutions)
were consulted on the predecessor document to the work programme
(the March 2007 communication entitled Annual Policy Strategy
for 2007), but the TUC is not aware of what positions the British
government took. The TUC welcomes the decision of the Commission
to inform national parliaments directly of its proposals, rather
than just member state governments; hopefully this will lead to
debates on key issues and/or to more inquires like the present
one. That should contribute to greater coherence.
5. Thirdly, the TUC agrees, regretfully,
with the Commission that the Lisbon strategy has entered a new
phase. The original strategy in 2000 was about raising Europe's
ability to respond to challenges such as globalisation and technological
change through productivity and innovation policy. Social Europe
was an essential part of the solution: a broad and effective knowledge-based
society could only be built on a basis of high social cohesion
and strong workers' rights. However, the 2005 re-launch of Lisbon
fundamentally changed all that. The new agenda prioritised the
pillar of competitiveness over the pillar of social cohesion.
Jobs, irrespective of their quality, were seen as the best social
policy, and workers' rights, such as the right to job protection
and the right to a regular work contract, were treated as a "rigidity"
protecting the "insiders" at the expense of "outsiders".
In this view, the role of European policy was no longer seen as
to provide a social level playing field for competition on the
European labour market. Instead, European level policy was narrowed
down to policies that trigger competition and make member states
compete against each other for investments and jobs through wage
competition, longer working hours and precarious working conditions.
6. For the TUC it is wrong to set economic
and social progress against each other: they are friends, not
enemies—and this way of thinking has traditionally been
at the heart of the European model. All EU member states might
not have identical social or industrial relations systems—though
they do share a number of common or similar features—but
the key point is that all systems are at risk of being undermined
if Europe does not establish and enforce common basic minimum
standards.
7. There have been some indications recently
that the Commission might be re-thinking its position, and certainly
in the programme solidarity is made a strategic objective and
the importance of the "social core at the heart of how Europe
works" is highlighted. However, the programme does not envisage
progress on any of the key social dossiers: the revision of the
directives on European Works Councils and on Working Time, the
adoption of a directive on Temporary Agency Work, or the presentation
of a framework directive ensuring that public services (or Services
of General Interest in the EU jargon) can be run according to
public interest considerations and not just those of the market.
That being the case, a certain suspicion of the policy proposals
that are made—such as on "flexicurity" and on
the social reality stocktaking—is inevitable. Will those
exercises be used to reform and strengthen Europe's social dimension,
or to weaken it ?
8. Jacques Delors' quip that you can't fall
in love with the Single Market needs to be taken to heart, especially
as the situation has deteriorated since his day. Now, for many
European citizens the Single Market is associated with the liberalisation
of public services and with de-localisation or off-shoring—and
thus with unemployment and threats to living standards. The European
social model and social dimension are an essential way of bringing
Europe closer to the citizen again.
9. Fourthly, "better regulation",
which is an important part of the programme, is a concept that
can easily be filled with different, even contradictory, contents,
and the results for citizens are not always obvious. It is claimed
by organisations representing SMEs in the UK that they are struggling
to cope with running their businesses because of excessive and
complex regulations, many of which emanate from EU Directives.
However, there is no serious evidence that the UK economy is experiencing
any difficulties as a result of EU legislation, and the recent
Davidson Report on transposition of directives in the UK concluded
that there was very little evidence of "gold plating"
employment directives when they were transposed. Moreover, the
reduction of costs for business often implies the shift of these
costs to society in general and to citizens and employees.
10. The TUC accepts that there is an issue
in the UK about the transposition of employment and safety directives,
as our legal and industrial relations structures are very different
from those in many other member states. There is for example very
little legally enforceable national or sectoral level collective
bargaining in the UK. If there were to be, that would provide
a non-regulatory means of implementation. The TUC believes that
a distinction needs to be drawn between regulation that requires
particular procedures to be followed and regulation that underpins
policy objectives. Clearly the former should be devised in such
a way as to ensure achievement of the latter, but should not become
elevated into policy status. As long as that distinction is retained,
efforts to improve, and where possible without affecting policy
objectives, reduce regulation can be supported.
January 2007
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