Essential workers of Europe converge on Brussels for demo over labour conditions

On Tuesday (1 October), around a thousand cleaners, security guards and food service workers from nine member states are rallying in Brussels, calling for fair working conditions and a reform of the EU’s public procurement directives.    

Holding trade union flags in the heart of Brussels’ European quarter, workers are complaining of low wages, overloading workloads and a lack of professional recognition for their work.

"Working conditions are getting worse and worse," said a cleaner at the European Parliament during a meeting with MEPs on Tuesday, adding that "in the past I used to have three hours to do a certain job and today I have only one hour for the same amount of work".   

While some workers went on strike at Charleroi airport today, disrupting flights from Brussels' main airports, others from countries such as Germany, France, Spain and Italy are rallying outside the European institutions' headquarters to pressure EU policymakers for new legislation.    

Essential workers are calling on EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to urgently overhaul the rules on public procurement, which public authorities in the EU use to award contracts to private companies to provide work, goods and services.    

“The solution is to make sure that we use public money as a leverage to improve workers’ conditions,” said Olivier Roethig, regional secretary of the services union UNI Europa, adding that public money can’t go to ‘bad employers’.  

Von der Leyen has tasked Stéphane Séjourné with reviewing the EU's public procurement directives, which govern how public authorities in the EU spend around 14% of GDP (around €2 trillion) each year buying goods and services in sectors ranging from energy and transport to health and education.   

Séjourné will have to ‘simplify the rules’ and ‘reduce administrative burdens’ to ensure security of supply for vital technologies and allow preference for European products - but his mission letter makes no mention of sustainability or social aspects. 

“What she [von der Leyen] has not said is how she wants to change them, and that's why I also think it's the perfect timing for a demonstration here, and for pushing for concrete proposals on how we can strengthen the social criteria in the directive,” MEP Li Andersson (Finland/The Left) told Euronews.  

2014 reform ineffective, EU auditors concluded

The EU's public procurement market has become less competitive over the past decade, partly because most contracts are still awarded to the lowest bidder, with a focus on cost rather than value for money, according to the last analysis by the European Court of Auditors (ECA).  

The latest figures available show that in eight member states more than 80% of contracts were awarded to the lowest bidder.  

In addition, the number of bidders per procedure fell from an average of 5.7 to 3.2 between 2011 and 2021, and current procurement procedures now take an average of 96.4 days, up from 62.5 days.  

The bloc reformed the rules in 2014 to address these issues, but since the 2014 revision, procedures have not been simplified, access for SMEs has not been improved, and innovative and social aspects have only been taken into account to a limited extent, the EU auditors concluded.  

For industry group BusinessEurope, the existing problems in the public procurement market are due to ineffective enforcement and application of the rules and, contrary to the view of trade unions, a revision of the framework is not a fitting solution.