Women and the Lisbon Treaty

Precariousness and the undermining of equal opportunities for women by EU economic policies – why does legislation not work?
The Irish voters said No to the Lisbon Treaty – but still the EU countries continue to ratify the treaty. A clear majority of those voting No were women. This did not happen by chance.
Why should women oppose the Lisbon Treaty?
Because basically the Lisbon Treaty continues the attempt to realize the fundamental neo-liberal policies of the fallen EU Constitutional Treaty.
To oppose both is necessary to be able to secure equal opportunities and equal pay for women.

EU neo-liberalism and the lack of equal pay
Neo-liberal economic policies have been central to the EC and EU build-up since the adoption of the European Single Market in the 1980s, aiming to create free movement of capital, goods, labour and services all over the EU. The completion of the Single Market has increased the pressure for liberalization and privatization. The other central element in EU neo-liberalism has been the adjustment to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) starting in the 1990s, which led to cuts in public spending and thus also opened the way for privatization. These policies have consistently undermined the equal opportunities and social security of women. Despite the equal opportunities and equal pay legislation of the EU (EEC) and national governments since the 1970s.

Since the beginning of the 1990s an increasing pay gap between women and men has been experienced in Denmark, especially within the private sector. According to new figures from ETUC (European Trade Union Confederation) there has been an increase in the gender pay gap in Denmark of 2% (to around 17-18%) since 2001, whereas the pay gap has been reduced in other EU countries, except in Finland. In Sweden in particular there has been a gender pay gap reduction of around 3 %. But in many EU countries, among them Germany and Britain, wage differences between women and men are on average over 20%. In a number of EU countries there are no proper statistics to rely on with regard to this issue. Wage differences between women and men are at a totally unacceptable level all over Europe and the EU.

When things move so slowly within the EU with regard to achieving equal opportunities and pay – and in some cases move in the wrong direction – this can be explained to an important extent by the neo-liberal economic policies of EU countries. On one hand they have led to cuts in public sector spending, where most employees are women, as for example in the Scandinavian countries. This has hit women in particular by freezing their wages. Therefore there have been widespread strikes for wage increases and equal pay both in Finland (the hospital sector) last year, and this spring in Denmark and amongst nurses in Sweden. A large majority of the strikers were women.

On the other hand the pressure for liberalization and privatization also leads to increasing wage differences between private and public sector workers and increasing competition between employees. Very often women get the worst deals, as they are generally regarded as having a ”poorer” working capacity, as they are the ones having maternity and child care leave etc.

These economic policies have led to a situation of increasing precariousness and impoverishment among women, single mothers in particular.

The Lisbon treaty
The Lisbon Treaty turns an extreme form of free market economy into a basic ideology of the EU. This is not a treaty about people and for people, but about free competition and money.

The Lisbon Treaty institutionalizes an extreme free market economy – making it the basic principle of the Union, which has far-reaching detrimental consequences for women. Market economy will be imposed by law from above. Economic policy will no longer be the responsibility of democratically elected governments. It means removing the possibility of the citizens of individual EU member states to have an influence on or decide different economic and social policies.

The Lisbon agenda
Not to confuse the Lisbon Treaty with the Lisbon Agenda of 2000, it should be underlined that the latter is one of the EU’s most important tools for undermining working conditions and pay, as well as workers’ rights, as it has done for some years already.

The Lisbon Agenda aims at making the EU economy one of the world’s most competitive by 2010 – by deregulating the labour market and increasing competition. As such it has influenced EU treaties (such as the EU Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty) as well as directives. For example the EU services or Bolkestein directive, which turns public welfare services into commodities for sale. A recent EU health directive will speed up this development within the health sector.

Women depend on public welfare
As women still have the primary responsibility for the caring work in society, women are generally more dependent on a ”welfare for all” high-level social policy to gain economic independence and gender equality. As opposed to the cut-downs and privatisations (including more insurance-based ”welfare”) of public services envisaged in the Lisbon Treaty, and which is already imposed in our societies, with its goal of continued economic liberalization.

Only 58% of women in the EU are in the labour market, mainly due to a lack of good and cheap public day care. With more privatisation it will be even more difficult for women to have secure and quality employment with an adequate wage. The imposition of an extreme free market economy is anti-social and particularly detrimental to women.

The Treaty undermines efforts to achieve democracy and gender equality
Women need an extension of democracy and more and better public welfare to gain more power and equality. Despite the inclusion of the principle of equality between women and men in the Lisbon Treaty text as a goal of the EU, this remains just beautiful words, because the rest of the text (and the policies) remains the same.

The Lisbon Treaty undermines efforts to achieve democracy and gender equality by imposing free market economic and social policies. It is anti-democratic, as it concentrates and centralizes power in the EU bureaucracy, and in the hands of the European top-level political elite and weakens the role of democratically elected national parliaments and the democratic influence of ordinary citizens.

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