Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-15-Speech-3-016"
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"en.20061115.3.3-016"2
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".
Mr President, in Parliament's relations with the Council, we are familiar with codecision and conciliation. Today, with the Services Directive, we can add capitulation to that. What other word is there for the incredible decision taken by the majority groups to yield to the Council's urgings by agreeing to withdraw all the amendments examined in the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and to adopt the Council's common position without opposition, even though it is indubitably a backward step from their own compromise of 16 February this year?
I would remind you that the European Trade Union Confederation felt it necessary to amend this text on certain points that it regarded as being 'of major importance', notably with regard to the 'clearer exclusion of labour law and social services, and clearer respect for fundamental rights'.
In fact, the Council's text makes the preservation of labour law in the Member States subordinate to compliance with Community law – a vague wording that refers to the rules on competition. Some of you are consoling yourselves with Commissioner McCreevy's reassuring statement. This really is very odd reasoning. Dare I remind you that it was in fact Mr McCreevy who, just a year ago, used Community law to justify preventing a Latvian business from recognising collective agreements in Sweden, in the Waxholm affair that caused such a stir?
On the other hand, the Council has restored to the Commission an incredible level of power to monitor – both before and after the fact – the legislation of the Member States; it was precisely this power that Parliament wanted to restrict. Mr McCreevy sees this change as a crucial improvement, and that is perfectly understandable, but what does Parliament see in it? Nobody is saying anything.
Finally, the ambiguities and grey areas in the text of the directive – which I criticised at first reading on behalf of my group because, as I said at the time, they leave the door open for uncontrollable interpretation from the Commission and the Court – have already started to be exploited as we feared they would be. For example, the Commission's communication on social services sets out an extremely simplistic vision of these services, which, by the way, Commissioner Špidla was keen to stress would increasingly fall within the scope of Community law on the internal market and competition.
Another Commission communication, dealing with the posting of workers, attacks regulations in certain Member States with respect to service providers from other EU countries that it regards as disproportionate. Here, too, the Commission is leaning on the inexhaustible case-law of the Court. Where, then, are the safeguards that the directive was supposed to provide against this slippery slope leading the whole of social life into anything-goes competition?
In general, the President-in-Office put it very clearly: 'the Court's interpretation will be needed in many cases'. Well, my group will not support this massive deregulation exercise. Above and beyond the issue of services, there is, in my view, the issue of the concept of European integration. Do we want to use the law to harmonise protective rules and push them upwards, or are we going to accept the harmonisation through the market and competition of standards that will consequently inevitably be dragged downwards? Do we want to promote parliamentary and citizens' democracy, or are we going to allow ourselves to be governed by case-law and interpretative communications?
A few weeks away from the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, these are perfectly legitimate questions, and I am willing to bet that many of our fellow citizens will soon be asking them quite forcefully."@en1
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