Brussels, 10/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 10 February, the European Commission expressed its concern to the European Parliament about the persisting conflict over the past two years at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on the question of the right to strike in international labour regulations. It called on member states to work out a common position, whilst pointing out that the right to strike was a fundamental right within the EU.
This is one of the most sensitive cases in several different aspects. Commissioner Marianne Thyssen (Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility) chose her words carefully when she made her speech during the European Parliament plenary session. Although the Commission position is effectively a legal point of view without importance in this dossier, it is, politically, part of an extremely sensitive overall context. The EU has indeed considered the right to strike as one of its fundamental rights but the question of balance between the principle of the free provision of services and the right to carry out collective action continues to create controversy as soon as it is raised, particularly after the controversial rulings by the European Court of Justice in the 2007 Viking and Laval cases.
This balance is now being debated at the ILO. The dispute between employers' representatives and unions centres around the question of where the right to strike should be placed in the 1948 international convention on trade union freedom and union law (No. 87). As summed up by Thyssen, employers and workers' representatives at the ILO “disagree on whether or not the right to strike is protected under the ILO convention” as well as “on the capacity of the ILO supervisory bodies to decide on the scope of the right to strike, its limits and the conditions for its legitimate exercise”.
While this concern has already been apparent for the past two years, mainly at the International Labour Office in Geneva, it is also growing almost everywhere in the world. The Commissioner explained, “And here we have a problem. I'm deeply concerned of this development. Having a well functioning ILO standards supervision system is important for us, since its conclusions are crucial to assess compliance with international labour standards”. She added that the risk of such a dispute persisting would endanger the tripartite relations and undermine the ILO and its supervisory system. This problem should have been brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has a remit for settling this kind of dispute. The unions and member states said that they supported such a solution in the middle of last November but the ILO was unable to make a decision. An informal tripartite meeting is due to take place on 23-25 February, in an effort to prepare the forthcoming Board of Directors meeting in March 2015.
The EU only has observer status at the ILO and for this reason, Thyssen indicated that the Commission would not intervene in this broader question, which she described as a “delicate matter” in which the different actors required support. Nonetheless, she did point out that the right to strike is a fundamental EU freedom and that she would support the member states “to speak with one voice”. Both the EPP and Social Democrats supported her in this approach. (Jan Kordys)