SOLIDAR: Together for Social Europe
SOLIDAR partners Social Platform and EASPD organised a hearing on the EU horizontal social clause hosted by Jutta Steinruck (MEP, S&D) on December 9 in the European Parliament. The aim of the meeting was to bring all civil society organisations, trade unions and social economy actors together to talk to representatives of the European Parliament and other EU institutions about a more social Europe, and discuss how we could best use the social clause to achieve our aims.
Professor Nikolaus Dimmel (University of Salzburg) presented his study on the social clause. He pointed out that article 9 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) is binding in terms of procedure but not in terms of regulation. It does not provide any actions, individual or legal rights and it does not apply to labour market policy in member states, hence this instrument can only be considered as ‘soft law’. The article allows for social criteria to be taken into account in the impact assessment.
Monika Velikonja (Evaluation Officer, DG EMPL), explained that an assessment of the social impact requires the preparation of proposals by all DGs. Jutta Steinruck (S&D), Marian Harkin (ALDE) and Terry Reintke (Greens) mentioned that the European Parliament is preparing a social impact assessment procedure.
European networks welcomed the will of the European Parliament to implement a procedure. As Conny Reuter (Secretary General of SOLIDAR) said, all stakeholders ‘should do their social impact assessment’. SOLIDAR, with its member organisations, has developed a tool, Social Progress Watch, for monitoring social progress. The results for 2014 were presented last week and can be found here.
