I will limit myself to a short comment, for I want to focus upon one crucial point: what the workers and their representatives can do to make Social Europe more European. It is a crucial point as no other option exists to stop the slow but inexorable decoupling which would otherwise intervene between social protection and the economic integration of our enlarged Europe.
Let me summarise the essential arguments leading to this conclusion. We enjoy speaking of a European Social Model and we have some reasons to do so, because the average social protection existing in our Union is higher than elsewhere in the world and its underpinning principles tend to be similar in most of our member states. However, we well know that historically and legally our welfare institutions are national constructions, moulded by the social and political arenas existing in each of our countries. They still remain the paramount responsibility of the member states, not of the Union. Building a single economic space and preserving fragmented social institutions can work, but only up to a certain limit. We are now experiencing the inconvenient truth of this reality.
For years the defence of our social rules and institutions availed itself of a sort of immunity from the main rules of the common market and it was due to such immunity that the ‘anti-competitive’ effects of collective contracts were beyond the range of competition rules. But more recently the implications of such rules and even more of the freedom of movement in the enlarged Europe have created conflicts with national social protection systems which have dangerously shaken the immunity and its borders.
Here I could enter into technical details and also make use of good arguments to challenge the decisions of the European Court of Justice in the cases Laval and Viking, which have given rise to the current debate. However, if we look at such cases in more general terms, we are forced to understand that the basic conflict is not only between labour and companies, but first of all between the national dimension and the European one. What does this mean? It means that in the long run the national dimension is doomed to be the loser and therefore labour itself would be the loser should it remain confined within national borders.
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Mr Amato’s proposal sounds interesting and is rather common sense. In an era of transnationism and supranationalism, labour unions and representatives need to utilise the new mechanisms existing on the European level far more than they have thus far done. I still believe, however, that this should not replace and delitigitimise naional solutions in regards to social policy, especially in relation to social security and labour standards.
Il principio è giusto, ma l'Europa non può essere concepita come qualcosa di precostituito e i confronti debbono avvenire attraverso anche uno scontro con gli interessi prevalenti nell'Europa stessa. Pertanto bisogna che il sindacato o i partiti che organizzazo il consenso europeo, si inventino nuove categorie politiche per nuove dimensioni economici e sociali!