TTIP: CESI welcomes the EP Employment Committee opinion and calls on the International Trade Committee to take its suggestions on board
2015-04-16 12:00
Earlier this month, the European Parliament’s Employment (EMPL) Committee adopted its opinion in relation to the TTIP own-initiative report that is being drawn up in the International Trade (INTA) Committee. CESI broadly welcomes the EMPL Committee opinion and calls on the INTA Committee to take up its input during its upcoming committee vote.
he EMPL Committee opinion calls, inter alia,
- “to take immediate steps to guarantee Member States’ right to legislate, fund, organise, set quality and safety standards for, manage and regulate all public services, including education, social services, health services, water supply, sewage disposal, waste disposal, social security, railways and public transport, energy, cultural and audiovisual services, etc. and to ensure the exclusion of public services (including water, health, social security systems and education) from the scope of the treaty”;
- “to ensure an explicit exclusion of public services, as referred to in Article 14 TFEU, from the scope of application of TTIP, in order to ensure that national and local authorities have the freedom to introduce, adopt, maintain or repeal any measure with regard to the commissioning, organisation, funding and provision of public services”;
- to safeguard “the full scope for the re-nationalisation and re-municipalisation of services”; and
- “to ensure, in order to safeguard the European social model against competition from Anglo-Saxon American capitalism, and that collectively funded public services and social security systems are not sacrificed”.
As a stakeholder representing several million employees working in the field of public services, CESI welcomes and fully supports the opinion of the EMPL Committee and the above provisions in particular. Indeed, the opinion reflects much of what CESI has actively worked for during the last months, when it was active on a ‘Gold clause’ initiative on the protection of public services in trade agreements together with the Social Platform.
CESI works for a full exclusion of public services from TTIP. It believes that both the quality of public services as well as working conditions for employees employed in that sector would likely deteriorate if public services were exposed to TTIP-induced pressures. In this context, CESI calls on the INTA Committee to take on board the suggestions by the EMPL Committee during its committee vote. The vote is scheduled to take place on May 28.
