Les nouveaux Etats membres, antithèse de l'Europe sociale

Le bilan des nouveaux Etats membres en matière de sécurité sur le lieu de travail apparaît extrêmement préoccupant. Malheureusement, les nouvelles orientations politiques de l’UE dans ce domaine semblent de nature à aggraver plutôt qu’à améliorer les choses, écrit Charles Woolfson dans Transitions Online.

Europe is in crisis. The future of the European Constitution is in doubt. So too, in some eyes, is the notion of a ‘social Europe’ – and part of the blame for that is being attributed to last year’s enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe. For some, enlargement has become associated with ‘social dumping’ in which the rights of working people are dumped in favor of growth, a ‘race to the bottom’ in which the new member-states are effectively acting as a Trojan horse for neo-liberal ideas, and a threat to hard-won social protections and labor standards in the existing member-states.

Whatever the merits or demerits of these interpretations, there is major reason to worry about safety standards in the new EU member-states, home to 43 million or so of the EU’s roughly 200 million workers. 

On paper, there should be few reasons to fear a lowering of labor standards since, before they joined, the EU’s new member-states had to adopt a vast body of EU law – and an explicit policy aim of the EU was to ensure that workers’ health and safety should not be sacrificed in pursuit of unfair competitive cost advantages in the single market. 

In practice, though, the average workplace in the new member-states is more dangerous, more unhealthy, and more unhappy than it is in the old member-states, the EU-15. Moreover, the trends may be worsening; in the Baltic states, a deterioration seems clear. At the same time the European Commission is beginning to adopt a different approach to regulating the European workplace. The danger is that it will only exacerbate the emerging trend in the Baltic states and, more questionably, in Central Europe. Why that may prove the case is, in large part, the same as the factors that explain why the adoption of EU regulations has failed to lift health and safety standards.

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.