The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) believes the blueprint showcases the same policies that created the crisis in the first place.
The organisation's critical statement, delivered yesterday (15 September), argued that the current proposals "basically boil down to virtually automatic sanctions, to be decided by finance ministers, against countries which fail to cut wages, social benefits and public services".
Blindly axeing social spending will ensure that EU member states not only fail to tackle the real root of the problem, but undermine one of the primary strengths of their common market, is the message from the workers' collectives.
ETUC General Secretary John Monks argued that "the policy of repressing wages, making labour markets more flexible and weakening trade unions has gotten us into this mess; returning to a similar policy will make matters even worse".
Rather than creating what ETUC mockingly calls an EU "sanctions team," the unions want the European Council to recognise "high and growing inequalities along with precarious work practices as the fundamental cause of macroeconomic imbalances".
Socialist PMs call for 'more balanced' economic message
In a similar vein, European Socialist prime ministers argued ahead of today's summit that the final economic governance package needed to deliver "a more balanced economic message than simply austerity cuts and sanctions".
In order to rebalance national budgets, they argued, "an effective, sustainable and socially balanced consolidation of public finances with medium-term expenditure reductions is necessary. But this needs to be complemented by the creation of new sources of revenue, including a financial transaction tax (FTT) and bank levies. Furthermore, the joint issuance of euro-denominated bonds ('Eurobonds') should be seriously explored".
For its part, ETUC argued that any deal must be about common European policies to "stop the social race to the bottom that is going on in the internal market".
The unions believe that the process of economic governance is too important "to be left to finance ministers" only and should be led by the European Council, with social and employment ministers and social partners – in other words, bodies such as ETUC itself - providing their input.
