International

Today on national radio could be heard the first part of a two-part series in which a documentary team followed VVD (centre-right liberals) MEP Hans van Baalen and myself around for a day of the Strasbourg plenary of the European Parliament. The underlying question three years after our election as Euro-MPs is: does it all make sense? My answer to this is positive: apart from the general attention paid to Europe, which has only grown, you can exercise some influence on European legislation. Two examples: we kicked out a Commission proposal to introduce still more competition at airports, a proposal which would undoubtedly have led to a further deterioration in conditions of employment for ground staff. And with 150 amendments I am trying to guarantee employees’ social rights when services are put out to tender.

The Commission is still neoliberal. Although nobody had asked for it, they recently came out with a proposal to increase the number of baggage handling firms at airports with more than five million passengers per year (relatively small airports, such as Liverpool and Bristol, qualify) from two to a minimum of three. During a working visit to Brussels International Airport at Zaventem, I noticed that there was little room for such an expansion, even physically. Baggage handling is heavy work with a lot of loading and unloading, and at Zaventem there is an antiquated infrastructure which means that the workers have to do a great deal of bending, climbing over unnecessary obstacles, and so on. Employers and trade unions agree that this can lead not only to dangerous situations, but also to deterioration in conditions of employment and working conditions. In order to be able to compete, you have to save on something, after all, and because of tight planning there is very little breathing space. This week I succeeded in persuading the rapporteur in the internal market committee that this was a disastrous plan, and she agreed also to drop the compulsory element and to ask the European Commission to report on the social consequences of the existing level of liberalisation. Social 1, Neoliberal 0.

Tendering is another subject where you are directly involved with working conditions. Home helps could tell you about this: murderous competition for tenders means that more firms are imposing enormously worse working conditions on their personnel. Fortunately my SP colleague, Member of the Dutch National Parliament Renske Leijten, may have thrown a spanner in the works with her law, which won cross-party support and a healthy majority and which puts an end to compulsory tendering of home help services. These side-effects of liberalisation, and the many complaints about the mountain of paperwork which must accompany any tender and which is a burden particularly to small firms, even the European Commission has understood that the rules must be adjusted. The Commission’s proposals will be voted on this week and I have put forward some 150 improvements, from reducing the size of contracts so that smaller firms can get a look in, and increasing the threshold above which contracts must be put out to Europe-wide tender, to respect for collective labour agreements and other labour laws. It will continue to be a case of push and shove, but I am hopeful that certainly a proportion of my proposals will be successful.

The drudgery which surrounds legislation means a great deal of work for the whole team in Brussels. Nevertheless, I am convinced that these efforts will be rewarded. We are stuck with a right wing majority in the EP, but now and then you can make legislation more social. As long as this is the case, we must in my view soldier on. And also, I of course provide a look-out post for the SP. You often hear first what the Commission is going to come up with next and this information is useful for our colleagues in the Dutch Parliament. That, added to the chance it gives you to join in the more general discussion on Europe in the media, on evening talk shows and so on, makes the work of a Euro-MP worth the effort.