Postal Services

Over the coming weeks, MEPs and national governments will vote on a landmark piece of legislation which could have widespread ramifications for the future of the EU.

The highly-charged and often emotional 20-year battle over liberalisation of Europe’s postal markets pits evangelists for a free-market against the self-appointed advocates of a fair society.

Postal unions fearing massive job-cuts in the wake of market opening - planned for 2009 - have called on Charlie McCreevy, European commissioner for the internal market to resign. At stake, they say, is the entire ‘European project’. Postal liberalisation, they warn, will herald the beginning of the end for EU integration. "If he doesn’t listen, the price will be paid," says Bernadette Ségol, regional secretary of union network UNI-Europa.

Faced with one of the most high-profile challenges of his EU career, McCreevy appears weary. "I’m a pragmatic and reasonable person, but do we want this going on until 2050?" he asks. "Let’s get real about this debate. Are people really serious about the single market at all? Orare they only serious about the single market if it doesn’t affect their own market?"

The battle to break the stranglehold of powerful national champions has been raging for nearly 20 years. The European Commission published a white paper on postal services in 1988, but it was not until 1997 that a law set rules on users’ rights to a universal service, required the designation of a national regulator and set the legal monopoly at 350 grams. A second directive in 2002 opened the market up further and from 2006 reduced the monopoly to mail weighing less than 50g. The 2009 deadline for liberalisation of the market for letters under 50 grams was set in October’s proposals for the third postal directive.

McCreevy regrets that the three ringleaders opposing the 2009 deadline for liberalisation of the postal market - Belgium, France and Luxembourg - are founding members of the European Union. "When all these great politicians come to great big meetings…they pontificate about how opening markets is a good thing but then when it comes to specific things, they start to fall over themselves in fear," he says.

Belgium, France and Luxembourg have managed to rally the support of seven other member states in their campaign to delay market opening, perhaps to 2012. Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, Malta and Slovakia are also wary of reforms that could undermine provision of the so-called universal obligation guaranteeing citizens access to services, whether they live in urban hubs or half-way up the Alps.

Forcing reliable monopoly operators to compete, the argument goes, could destroy time-honoured distribution networks and place thousands of jobs at risk. Postal services are, in a word, sacred.

In McCreevy’s view, liberalisation does not have to tear at the delicate fabric of society. "I see some member states proposing studies. We could fill the room with studies that have been done and all the studies said that opening up the market was a good thing," he says. Customers in liberalised markets - Estonia, Finland, Sweden and the UK - are, he says, "happier than they were before" and companies "are making more money than they used to".

Aware of mounting opposition to proposals, German centre-right MEP Markus Ferber, who is reporting on the matter for the European Parliament’s transport and tourism committee, has hastily been trying to assemble a compromise that might bring both sides of the divide together. Difficulties in striking a compromise deal have forced the committee to postpone its vote on the proposal from next week (5 June) to 18 June at the earliest. EU telecoms ministers will discuss the general approach on 7-8 June. Among halfway-house suggestions mooted are postponement of liberalisation to 2011 or 2012 and/or a two-track approach whereby new member states and Greece are given longer to comply with the third postal directive. Also suggested is a reciprocity clause so that operators from markets that remain closed are not allowed to do business in other member states.

Although realistic about the need for a compromise, McCreevy is dead-set against the reciprocity clause. "I don’t think that would work and it wouldn’t be right. The intention is to have a real single market," he says.

"It would be grossly unfair for some countries to open up their borders completely with a certain amount of difficulty and nobody else opens up. That would be an à la carte open market."

As unions prepare for a Europe-wide day of industrial action next week (6 June), Ségol puzzles over why the unpopular yet often populist Commission should be driving through measures that could, according to her estimates, bring about 60,000 job losses in Germany and the UK alone. "We don’t think he [McCreevy] has understood anything of the feeling among EU citizens and workers…He doesn’t take time to listen and understand the message we want to put forward. The EU is not simply a single market. It has to bring something to people."

Over the coming weeks, MEPs and national governments will vote on a landmark piece of legislation which could have widespread ramifications for the future of the EU.