- conditions of employment for third-country nationals residing in the EU;
- financial contributions for the promotion of employment and job-creation.
Article 138 of the Treaty requires the Commission to consult the social partners
in two stages: (a) on the need for and the possible direction of Community
action; and (b) on its content. At the end of this consultation process, the orga-
nizations can present an opinion to the Commission or inform it of their
intention to open negotiations on the subject. In this case, the social partners
have an initial period of nine months to reach an agreement. Where the social
partners do not take the initiative, or do not reach agreement, the Commission
resumes its active role.
Looking back, the European Commission (2000b: 20) records that there
have been 34 ‘joint texts’ since the start of the Val Duchesseprocess (see Figure 17.2).
Only four of these are noteworthy: the original agreement dealing with the role
of the social partners, which underpinned the social chapter to the Maastricht
Treaty; and the three ‘framework agreements’ subsequently given legal status as
directives – on parental leave, part-time work and fixed-term, temporary
employment.
Wages, employment and ‘open co-ordination’
benchmarking towards ‘Europeanization’?In recent years, more and more Commission time and effort has been put into
the different forms of co-ordination involving the identification of ‘best prac-
tice’ and target-setting based on benchmarking. Indeed, these might be said to
be taking over from the traditional community methods of legal enactment
and collective bargaining as the main regulatory process. Benchmarking started
life as a management tool and continues to be widely used in multinational
companies (Sisson et al., 2002). Its attraction for EU policy makers is that it
helps to resolve the collective action problems of securing agreement to com-
mon or standard templates associated with legal enactment and collective bar-
gaining. Common goals can be identified and countries encouraged to achieve
them, but they retain the freedom to decide the means in the light of their own
circumstances.
In the case of wages, the process of co-ordination is very informal. Strictly
speaking, wage determination remains the province of the social partners in
the individual member states. It is nonetheless seen as the third element of the
EU’s macroeconomic policy mix, monetary policy being in the hands of the
European Central Bank (ECB) and fiscal policy remaining the responsibility of
national governments. The key messages were taken up in the broad economic
policy guidelines adopted by the Council of the European Union in 1998 and
updated in subsequent years (European Commission, 2000c). The Council
stressed that ‘in EMU, with the single monetary regime, the link between wages
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