January 20, 2006 , Article in „Klartext“ (Left Party.PDS district newspaper/Berlin): A directive for the market, not for services

 

By André Brie

 

On February 15, the plenary session of the European Parliament will decide, in first reading, on the service directive; later on also the second European legislator, the Council (the governments) will do so. It does not look very promising. The draft by the former EU commissioner Bolkestein certainly was changed in the Interior Market committee of the EU on numerous questions, and there were also some positive restrictions of the area of application (for instance, the exclusion of health services), where the Left Party took active part, but the so-called country of origin principle was imposed by conservatives and liberals under the new name “Free Traffic in Services”. Lower standards become a competitive advantage, higher ones a disadvantage. The European market for services in this way is opened for a dumping race to the bottom: as far as wages, social standards, consumer and environmental protection law, quality, certainly also as far as guarantee laws and legal security for the clients overall are concerned. In the final vote in the committee, the German social democrats abstained or agreed. They justified that by the integration of a few positive formulations on maintaining a high quality of services and on social protection. The legal binding force of these, however, is close to zero and will not have any chance to withstand before the European Court of Law.

 

For clients and communities, for instance, who anyway have to offer many of their contracts in a European-wide tender, this will mean, moreover, that they will, in the future, have to respect 25 different European legal systems. That the control – different from what was proposed by the Commission – remains with those countries, where the service is being exercised, will change nothing for the good, because what agency and what court of law will be able to ensure the keeping of legal provisions and laws of another country (and in that country’s) language?  That is absurd. The fact that, moreover, the contract work agencies were drawn into the area of application of the directive by the committee in a vote of 19 against 18 will also open other economic branches to this work of destruction in the social, environmental, and consumer protection area. Anyhow, services already make up 70 percent of the European economy, and only a minority of them is not seized by this directive. There exists at present no project of neoliberal market radicalism that would be more strategic and weightier in its consequences than this one. Every form of resistance is necessary – ranging from the trade unions and other social movements, artisans to women and men consumers, and local communities. To complain about “ Europe ” with hindsight is a widespread response, but will not have any effect. It does not have to be this way. The European harbour workers have just demonstrated it. The port directive proposed by the Commission failed on January 18.