Europe’s social protection – threatened with extinction?

Date: 17/03/05

Is the long-cherished European social model under attack? Champions of social protection grew uneasy when European Commission President José Manuel Barroso presented his rather liberal-minded Commission in August last year. They found their fears confirmed when he unveiled the EU executive's work programme for 2005 at the end of January.

All three left-wing Parliamentary groups, the Party of European Socialists (PES), the Greens and the United European Left/Nordic Greens (GUE), voted against the programme, which emphasised the need for boosted competitiveness in the Union and declared "more and better jobs" to be the most important aspect of social cohesion.

PES group leader Martin Schulz accused the Commission of trying to undermine Europe's social security standards and group vice-chair Jan Marinus Wiersma spoke of being fully committed to the "battle going on in Parliament" between the right and left-wing factions.

Positions were further polarised with the publication of Barroso's prescription for streamlining the Lisbon Agenda. Unabashedly liberal, the agenda stresses the importance of growth, the flexibility of Europe's labour markets and deregulation. And despite Barroso's analogy that the economy is his sick child - "if one of my children is ill, I focus on that one, but that does not mean that I love the others less" - the left wing let rip.

GUE accused him of being businesses' new "idol". Socialist Robert Goebbels claimed Barroso clearly had a "favourite" child and PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen reminded Barroso that the Nordic social model provided the "right and modern framework" for combining growth with social policy.

Europe's trade union association ETUC was equally unimpressed, complaining that there was "too much focus" put on deregulation and more flexible labour markets instead of helping employees to cope with change with better social protection.

The carefully timed release of Employment Commissioner Vladimír Spidla's five-year social agenda - published exactly one week after the new Lisbon Strategy - did little to dampen the criticism.

The agenda, which will run from 2005 until 2010, also focuses on raising employment levels as well as improving worker mobility via portable pensions. The commissioner also announced his intention to create a European gender institute, a green paper on new forms of work, a second round of social partner consultations on restructuring, a possible voluntary framework for cross-border collective bargaining and an initiative on data protection for workers.

The Platform of European Social Non-Governmental Organisations attacked the lack of substantive policies within the social agenda. "Despite a quick reference to the fundamental principles of the Union enshrined in the new constitution, the social agenda is devoid of concrete commitments to the EU's social objectives," the social platform said.

The readiness with which the business world welcomed the new Lisbon Agenda did not help Barroso's attempts to defend Europe's social model. The European employers' association UNICE lauded the proposal and went even further, claiming that the social agenda's call for more collective bargaining and more consultation on restructuring could undermine the new focus on competitiveness.

But Barroso, backed by the centre-right European People's Party (EPP-ED) in the European Parliament, continues to insist that his overall aim is sustainable development. Given the current state of the European economy and the imminent competition threats from the East, the model that the socialists are so desperate to protect will not survive unless governments prioritise economic reform, he argues. Finding jobs, he told MEPs in February, was the "best social agenda".

Although heads of state and government are likely to endorse the revised Lisbon Agenda at the Spring Summit on 22-23 March, the Commission president will still have a tough job convincing the leaders of France and Germany to make it a reality.

Both nations have already wielded their power to force the Brussels executive to back-track on the services directive, one of the key proposals in the Lisbon Agenda which would open up the huge EU services market but which France, later backed by Germany, claimed would undermine social standards.

Charlie McCreevy, commissioner for the internal market, who inherited the original proposal from predecessor Frits Bolkestein, has said that he will not back any law that risks social dumping between member states, and healthcare and public services will most likely be removed from its scope.

French workers, who are currently demonstrating against Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's attempts to loosen the 35-hour working week, have already drawn a link between reforms and the constitution ahead of the national referendum on 29 May. And the German social democrat government, which is facing increasing dissension over its labour market reforms, now expects to lose an election in its most populous region, North Rhine-Westphalia, on 22 May.

Throughout Europe, the battle over social protection is set to play a prominent part in election and referendum campaigns for months to come.

Analysis feature discussing resistance of left-wing Parliamentary groups in the European Parliament, trade unions and the Governments of some Member States against the Barroso Commission's work programme and the Lisbon Agenda which in their view threatens to undermine the European social model by taking a very liberal approach.