Smaller businesses want a say in a workable solution

Date: 21/05/1998

By Simon Coss

AROUND 20 million EU employees and 5 million businesses have no real voice in the European social dialogue, say critics of the system.

The European Association of Craft and Small and Medium Enterprises (UEAPME) is one of the Union's largest representatives of small businesses, yet it is not a European social partner.

When the basis of the current social dialogue system was agreed in 1985 at the Val Duchesse château in Brussels, only three organisations recognised each other, and were in turn recognised by the European Commission, as the legitimate voices of workers and employers in EU-level negotiations.

They were the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), private sector employers' federation UNICE and the CEEP, representing public sector companies.

UEAPME was left out in the cold. “The central question to be answered today is how the current European social dialogue can guarantee democracy when only three social partners negotiate framework agreements which, with the approval of the Commission and Council of Ministers, are adopted as directives, binding instruments applicable to all employers and workers in the EU,” complained UEAPME secretary-general Hans Werner-Müller recently.

UNICE argues that it has a specific unit which represents small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) and that the sector's needs are adequately considered in social dialogue discussions.

However, Werner-Müller's organisation does not agree. UEAPME is so concerned about its exclusion from the talks that it has launched a legal challenge to the first directive passed through the social dialogue procedure, the 1995 agreement on parental leave, at the European Court of First Instance.

The basis of its case is that workers' and employers' representatives were not fully consulted when the original agreement was drawn up.

The organisation is planning to take similar action against the directive on part-time workers' rights which was negotiated by the social partners last summer.

The Commission argues it has no particular axe to grind as far as recognising UEAPME is concerned.

Officials simply say that all the social partner organisations must agree among themselves about how workers and employees should be represented at EU level.

“We would like to see this matter resolved, but we want the social partners to sort it out for themselves,” said an aide to Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn.

“If we unilaterally recognised UEAPME, where would we be if UNICE and the ETUC walked out of the process?” she added.

It is not just the Union's small business community which is unhappy with the way the social dialogue system operates. EU governments have complained that they can only accept or reject agreements drawn up under the system when they are presented to the Council of Ministers.

In other areas of legislation, member states can amend the proposals.

The European Parliament has even more reason to criticise the social dialogue as it is excluded from the system altogether - an omission most observers put down to a drafting oversight during the Maastricht Treaty negotiations.

In practice, the Commission has taken it upon itself to keep MEPs informed of ongoing deliberations, but the lack of any formal recognition in the process has irked many parliamentarians.

These complaints have, as one observer neatly summed it up recently, made “ a lot of people quite doubtful about how the social dialogue works”.

It will not, however, be possible to make any radical changes to the system until the EU treaties come up for revision again.