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On 29 May, the UNI Europa Executive Committee unanimously adopted a position paper on EU economic governance titled: For Socially Responsible and Democratic Economic Governance: A Trade Union Checklist. It sets out 12 benchmarks for socially responsible and democratic economic governance in the EU. The paper develops these 12 points under the headings of ‘economic policy at the service of society’, ‘social responsibility’, and ‘democratic accountability’.

Two additional UNI Europa papers complement the Checklist:
· Chamber of Horrors of EU Economic Governance. The leaflet gives examples of the anti-worker character of the EU's Country-specific Recommendations. Its updated English language version includes a summary of the Commission’s proposals for national structural reforms for the coming year, published last week. (Other linguistic versions of the leaflet will follow shortly).
· Squeezing Social Dialogue and Dismantling Social Europe: A Trade Union Analysis of EU Economic Governance. The research note examines the EU’s economic governance framework from a trade union perspective. It shows how these policies have translated market-meltdown into a social and humanitarian disaster, interfere in collective bargaining, and depress wages across the EU.

We invite you to diffuse these documents, which can be found in the related files tab, as widely as possible. As these papers make abundantly clear, a turn towards socially responsible and democratic economic governance in the EU is urgently needed; not least to ensure the trade union movement’s continued commitment to the process of European integration. In order to bring about such change, a critical debate on EU economic governance among trade unionists is warranted, especially as recent events show that European leaders intend to adhere to their neo-liberal policy-bias for the time being.

On 29 May the Commission published draft Country-specific Recommendations that serve to translate the EU’s economic priorities into national policies. According to the Commission’s proposals, the rigorous implementation of austerity policies will again be the key objective for EU economic governance. Insisting that fiscal consolidation can only be a matter of spending cuts, the Commission demands that public deficits are reined in by means of rolling back the welfare state and not, in any case, by increasing taxes. These policies disproportionately impinge on the weak and vulnerable parts of European society whilst better-off groups are left unaffected. As a sign against these harmful policies that attack the fabric of society, I encourage colleagues to join, disseminate, and support UNI Europa’s ‘Troika Watch’ anti-austerity campaign by visiting the webpage: https://www.facebook.com/TROIKAWATCH

One feature of this year’s Recommendations in particular illustrates how EU economic governance goes beyond fighting the crisis and is used to reorganise Europe in a neo-liberal fashion. Even those countries that have been relatively unaffected by the crisis are expected to apply structural reforms and to liberalise their services sectors along the lines of the EU services directive. This clearly shows how EU economic governance is used to dismantle traditional social models irrespective of their economic and fiscal sustainability.

This situation does not only incur enormous social costs on European society. It also leads to growing disunity in Europe. Immediately after the publication of the Commission’s draft, French President Francois Hollande and a number of conservative members of the German Bundestag publicly quarrelled over the question of how far the EU level may go in imposing policies on Member States. The French President insisted that national parliaments must be in charge of deciding upon concrete measures while the German deputies supported the Commission in prescribing detailed structural reform projects. If EU economic governance continues to spark this sort of disputes between Member States, the process of European integration risks driving Member States apart rather than leading to European unity.

The June European Council will decide upon these proposals. Once they are adopted, they will directly interfere with the work of trade unions at the national level. It is for this reason that trade unions must address this issue in their communication with national governments and with the public at large, both with a view to assuring acceptable outcomes of the June Council meeting and to establishing a truly social Europe.