Mariella Radaelli & Jon Van Housen :
Largely formed as a barrier-free economic zone, the European Union has since provided mutual security, medicine, safety standards, and open travel within the continent. It is now considering unified working conditions and social protection among its member states.
As indications of an economic crisis began to surface in 2007, leading members signed the Treaty of Lisbon that year for a more competitive EU market economy that promotes full employment and social progress. But that target remains distant, with wages, work benefits and programmes still widely disparate. The leaders, however, have not given up on the high-minded goal. Last November, in Gothenburg, Sweden, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker proclaimed a “European Pillar of Social Rights” that enshrines principles essential for fair, well-functioning labour markets and welfare systems in 21st century Europe. The initiative advocates principles and rights for equal opportunities in the labour market, fair working conditions, social protection and inclusion.
“A fair and more social Europe is the key in shaping our union’s future,” he said at the Gothenburg social summit. Juncker wants to set up a new EU institution to monitor how labour laws are applied in member states, with the commission scheduled to release a formal proposal for a European Labour Authority in March that could even include an EU-wide social security number to unify wage and tax records.
“Today we commit ourselves to a set of 20 principles and rights,” said the proclamation from Junker. “From the right to fair wages and the right to health care, to lifelong learning and a better work-life balance, to gender equality and minimum income: with the European Pillar of Social Rights, the EU stands up for the rights of its citizens in a fast-changing world.”
The commission’s push for more legislation has caused friction with a handful of mostly eastern EU countries including Poland and Hungary that don’t want the EU to regulate rules on employment and wages. Yet Dr René Repasi, Scientific Coordinator of the European Research Centre for Economic and Financial Governance at the Universities in Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, says work conditions are at the core of a humane Europe. “Europe should base its future on the economic model of a social market economy,” he says.
About 16 million Europeans now live and work in a member state other than their nationality and every day 1.7 million Europeans commute to work in another member state. “The EU internal market requires the abolishment of barriers to free movement,” says Repasi. “The notion of ‘barrier’ does not in itself distinguish between unfair or socially sensitive barriers. This means that countries within the EU internal market can compete against each other on the basis of lower working conditions. In my eyes this is not fair competition. The EU needs to subtract varied working conditions from EU-wide competition,” he notes. “This can be done by setting uniform working conditions at the EU level. The EU internal market requires a level playing field and not a race to the lowest minimum standard.”
Although the risk of social exclusion in the EU overall has been falling from its high in 2012, worker poverty and extreme distress including homelessness, particularly among the young, have increased in a number of member states.
Repasi campaigns for harmonisation of European legal systems to create unified fair working conditions, but is the ideal possible? “Achieving a completely harmonised European economic system in one step is impossible,” he admits. “One of the founding fathers of the EU, Robert Schuman, said in 1950 that ‘Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity’.”
But the EU already has the legislative tools to set minimum standards on working conditions. “A legal act covering fair working conditions requires a majority vote in the European Parliament and a so-called qualified majority among member state governments,” Repasi explains. “Legally speaking, the EU can adopt it. The question is only one of political will.”
A successful example of a social market economy is already available in Europe. The German “wirtschaftswunder” (economic miracle) following WWII was helped by supportive social programmes. And the EU’s treaties have long spelled out inclusive programmes, including fundamental working rights set out in the European Social Charter signed at Turin in 1961.
(Mariella Radaelli and Jon Van Housen are editors at the Luminosity Italia news agency in Milan).
