Open Letter to Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission
The challenges facing Europe are clear and urgent. Modernisation is essential to continue Europe’s historically high levels of prosperity, social cohesion, environmental protection and quality of life, and to create the jobs we need.
These are the opening words of the European Commission’s proposed work programme for 2006. It goes on to suggest that the proposals it makes to achieve this objective will generate broad agreement amongst Europe’s political forces. This is regrettably mistaken.
On the eve of the informal summit at Hampton Court, Europe’s social democratic leaders, chaired by Tony Blair and myself, unanimously adopted a coordinated growth and investment strategy for Europe. Your Commission is pursuing a structural reform agenda for more growth, which we can support on the condition that this does not undermine our welfare states and citizens’ rights. But we maintain that structural reform must be accompanied by greater coordinated investments to boost internal demand and create new jobs.
Nowhere in the Commission’s work programme do we see proposals to start a process of coordinating economic policies better across the EU and improving economic governance. This is a pity. You could guide such co-operation without undermining national competence. It is a matter of leadership and co-operation.
Investment must come primarily from EU member states, but have a European dimension, which is where your Commission must fulfill its role. Cross-border projects and coordinated, simultaneous investments in infrastructures, networks and skills would have a big impact. Improved economic policy coordination is a must and so must the redirection of the EU budget into these priority areas.
Furthermore, given the high-profile debate on the European social model, it is quite remarkable that the Commission’s work programme contains no real initiatives for better social and employment standards. The majority of workers voted no to the Constitution in France and the Netherlands. Looking at this Work programme, you can see why.
On issues like public services and collective bargaining – which many people think will be undermined by the proposed Services Directive – the Commission is silent. In response to the continued calls for better worker consultation – which could be achieved through a revision of the European Works Council Directive – the Commission is mute in the face of widespread public calls. The workers of Rover in the UK or Hewlett-Packard in France will be unimpressed. What is Europe offering them or other workers who may soon be in their position?
What is lacking in the work programme, President Barroso, is coherence. This programme is not the way to connect Europe to ordinary, hard working people. It is time to show that Europe can combine modernized social security with new growth and jobs. Scandinavian countries provide the proof that these goals are not contradictory but go hand in hand to create the Social Europe we all want.
Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
President of the Party of European Socialists
