‘Right to strike’ law withdrawn

Lack of support from among the member states.

The European Commission is to withdraw a controversial legislative proposal on the right to strike.

The move comes after more than a third of the European Union’s national parliaments said that they were opposed to the proposal and the Commission saw that it was not going to achieve the necessary unanimous support of member states.

László Andor, the European commissioner for employment, social affairs and inclusion, made the announcement to members of the European Parliament’s employment and social affairs committee in Strasbourg on Tuesday (11 September) having obtained the agreement of other European commissioners earlier in the day.

The Commission will now send out letters to the Parliament and Council of Ministers informing them of the decision and will formally withdraw the proposal within the next fortnight.

Andor made his proposals on the right to take collective action in March but socialists and trade unionists criticised the plan immediately, saying that it would have the effect of undermining workers’ rights.

The legislation was intended to improve the law on the posting of workers from one EU member state to work in another. This posting-of-workers law became highly controversial shortly after the 2004 enlargement of the EU, with trade unions complaining that companies were using it to undermine pay and conditions.

At the time of the new proposal, Andor said that the rules would put workers’ freedom to strike “on an equal footing” with the EU’s internal market rules.

“This will help to defuse industrial conflicts,” he said.

Yellow cards

However, 12 national parliaments complained that the proposals would see the Commission going beyond its powers and for the first time invoked the ‘yellow card’ process introduced under the Lisbon treaty to try to get the Commission to abandon the plan.

A spokesman for the Commission said that officials had decided to withdraw the proposal not because of the ‘yellow card’ action, but because it saw that it had no chance of winning approval from member states.

Opposition

The proposal, which was known as “Monti II”, after the former European commissioner Mario Monti, now Italy’s caretaker prime minister, who drew up recommendations for the single market, was opposed from both ends of the political spectrum

Elisabeth Schroedter, a German Green MEP and a vice-chairwoman of the Parliament’s employment committee, said that the proposals were “flawed from the outset”.

“The right to strike is an inviolable fundamental right that should be upheld and defended by the EU, but the Monti II proposals did the reverse, limiting this right,” she said.

Stephen Hughes, a British centre-left MEP, said: “The Commission’s announcement on the withdrawal of the text leaves a vacuum. There are still huge legal uncertainties regarding the rights of workers.”

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A statement by the Parliament’s centre-right European People’s Party said that the decision demonstrated “national parliaments’ growing role in EU legislation”.