Services Directive : EPSU remains vigilant!

(March 2005) Never has a draft Directive caused so much confusion! Following the European Council on 22 and 23 March many believe that the fight to “dump the services directive” may have been won..... However, this is not the case. The trade union demonstration in Brussels on 19 March was very successful. However, the Council did not demand that the Commission withdraws the Directive, only added its weight to the statements coming from Commissioner McCreevy and President Barroso in the last weeks on the need to review the most controversial aspects. The liberalisation of services remains an essential element of the Lisbon strategy. Critics of the Directive are still labelled as ‘reactionary’.

So, for all the commotion, the EPSU position remains unchanged: we still think the approach taken in the draft Directive is wrong and that it should be withdrawn. And we do not think that this is a reactionary position, far from it: it is the logical consequence of having to work on a “politically and technically unworkable” piece of legislation.

The impact of the Directive on public services remains our concern. There have been comments from the Commission and some governments that publicly funded services of general interest are to be excluded. But is this assurance really any progress in comparison to the text of the draft directive? We don’ think so. Such a change would still mean that only services provided by the state, for no consideration are excluded from the scope of the directive. It still leaves us with the limbo of having to distinguish economic and non-economic SGI. The shifting boundaries between SGI and SGEI make this exemption rather unconvincing especially in the absence of a legal framework. Healthcare for instance is the prime example of a service that was deemed non-economic and has now been turned into a SGEI. It is therefore not enough to exclude for example ‘publicly funded’ health care - to use McCreevy speak - from the directive.

In any case the Directive reamins with the European Parliament. And it is the Parliament - not the Commission or the Council - who must decide what to do with the text. In the next weeks we shall have the two rapports from the main Committees dealing with the proposal and the Parliament will express its opinion in June or July. EPSU and our affiliates still need to make our concerns heard .