News

I know you are wondering: what is “C-Day”? The C stands for "CSR", as in the Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs), and it also stands for “Catherine”. That does not really help, does it? Let me explain in more detail.

Framed within the European Economic policy, the Commission will today publish its CSRs to the 27 EU member states. Basically, the CSRs are a set of 5 recommendations for each national government on how to reach the objectives of the Europe 2020 Strategy (among which the reduction of poverty, unemployment and school dropout rates). The first recommendation is always on micro-economic imbalances and often results in public budget tightening. The President of the Council and the Commission recently recognised that for the last two years, it has mainly focused on what they call “budget consolidation” or what we call “austerity measures”.

CSR may only be a three-letter acronym but the recommendations have a seriously damaging social impact. They are at the root of national budget policies and are the trigger for current austerity measures. The problem is that they are short-term policies and the EU is failing on the long-term approach. The Council and the Commission agreed recently that the “pace” and “content” of budget consolidation measures can be negotiated with the member states. This is very diplomatic language to say that the Commission will not be as strict as it has been with budget deficits and cuts in national budgets.

This is why two weeks ago, a Social Platform delegation of 7 people met with Catherine Day, the Secretary General of the Commission, to argue for a social dimension of the current EU economic policy. Ms Day and the Secretariat General play an essential role in coordinating the recommendations proposed by the Commission that will be published today.

We told her that European citizens increasingly question what the EU brings to them and they are witnessing growing social and economic gaps in our societies (just look at the demonstrations in Portugal last weekend – a group of citizens sang the revolutionary anthem inside the Parliament). We told her that our members and their thousands of national social NGOs are looking for more transparency in the process and the involvement of citizens and the organisations that work with them. We also want a strategy to combat poverty and not to wait for growth (that is not happening) to miraculously solve the issue.

We know that youth and employment will have a great place today in the CSRs but we said that employment is not enough – our youth deserve QUALITY jobs. Finally we also stressed that there is a need for coherence and consistency among the national recommendations in order to avoid that austerity measures (tightening of public spending) overtake other recommendations such as supporting investment in services useful to combating poverty.

We said all that. Let’s hope that some of these claims made it through the final process and will be reflected today.

If not, let’s engage again!

Pierre Baussand

Director