Brussels, 19/12/2000 (Agence Europe) - Despite significant social breakthroughs that meet trade union demands, especially regarding the European company, the social agenda and services of a general interest, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) criticises the results of the Nice Summit on three points: the lack of ambition of the new Treaty, the lack of any real progress regarding qualified majority voting (especially in the social, immigration and tax fields) and a Charter of Fundamental Rights that was not formally proclaimed.
In particular, ETUC welcomes the decision of the French Presidency of convening an extraordinary Council by the end of the year to approve worker participation in the European Company (EC), as well as the regulation on the statute of the EC. It calls for the social agenda to be applied "in a determined and consequential manner according to schedule" and places emphasis on the need, for services of a general interest, to have a regulatory framework at European level, in line with the Charter jointly drawn up with CEEP (public companies).
Trade unions demand of Unice (European employers) a change of attitude in European social relations based on a medium-term programme of social dialogue and highlights the urgency of an in-depth debate on the EU's future, as well as the end of the intergovernmental method for the revision of the Treaty. This debate announced in Nice with a new rendez-vous in 2004 should, says ETUC, "lead to a constitutional pact defining the goals, powers and architecture of the EU, and of which an improved Charter of Fundamental Rights, especially regarding social rights and trans-national trade union rights, would form an integral part". ETUC has thus decided to sign up to this debate now already, to provide it with its own contribution from the Summit of Laeken in December 2001, so as to "place all its weight on the choices that remain to be made to achieve a political, democratic, social and citizens' Europe".