Euractive.com — Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sent a letter to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker yesterday, asking if the bloc’s acquis communautaire applies to all EU countries without exception or it’s applicable to all except Greece.
In his letter, which was also sent to European Council President Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Malta Joseph Muscat and his Italian counterpart Paolo Gentiloni, Tsipras expressed his country’s intention to support the Rome Declaration “which moves in a positive direction”.
He noted that in these 60 years, the EU consolidated the achievements of its peoples whose goal is to “ensure progress, prosperity, and peace”.
“Nevertheless, in order to be able to celebrate these achievements, it has to be made clear, on an official level, whether they apply also to Greece. Whether, in other words, the European acquis is valid for all member states without exception, or for all except Greece,” the Greek prime minister said.
Greece as a “paradigm”
Minister of Labour, Social Security, and Welfare, Effie Achtsioglou, recently said it was obvious that the neoliberal forces view the issue of labour relations in Greece as a “new paradigm that must be generalised”.
The discussion about labour relations in Greece and the non-implementation of the EU acquis puts the European Commission in a difficult position.
Speaking at the European Parliament this week, embattled Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem stressed that collective agreements in the Greek labour market should be restored, but still has to be decided by the country’s creditors.
Tsipras explained that Greece has been in programs of economic adjustment for the last seven years, in the name of which “a situation of exception from our common European acquis has been implicitly imposed”.
“Most notably this relates to the exception from the European acquis on social rights and specifically the exception from ‘best practices’ on labour relations and collective bargaining,” the the Greek PM insisted, stressing that it’s not understood why there should be a prolongation of the exception of Greece from the European social acquis.
