I spent this busy and sometimes unpleasant week in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament's plenary session was held from Monday to Thursday.
1
On Tuesday, the European Parliament supported my report calling on the European Commission to adopt a just transition directive. For more details, see the press releases from the European Parliament and the European Trade Union Confederation. In short: the European Union must continue to provide financial support to workers affected by the digital and green transition, give them the right to paid retraining during working hours, and monitor EU member states to ensure that they spend money on real projects and create real jobs.
2
On Wednesday, 21 January, the European Parliament voted against a free trade agreement with the countries belonging to the Mercosur common market, which covers almost all of South America. More precisely, the European Parliament, by a margin of only 10 votes, sent the agreement to the European Court of Justice for legal review, which will take a year and a half or two years. Negotiations have been going on for more than a quarter of a century, and if the agreement had finally come into force, it would have
(a) brought direct benefits to the European economy, including Estonia;
(b) strengthened our position on the international stage;
(c) demonstrated the unity of the EU at a dramatic moment when the US, represented by Trump, is practically wiping its feet on us, or at least trying to.
As for the farmers' protests, the agreement provided for compensation, duties on sensitive goods, and other measures to minimise losses for European producers. I talk about this in more detail in my Brussels Diary (read here, TBA). Let's hope that neither China nor America will hijack the initiative over the next two years.
3
On the same Wednesday, Donald Trump gave a very confusing but consequential speech in Davos, which boiled down to the message: ‘Trump's America is the best. Europe without America is nothing. Give me Greenland.’ I mention this because Trump was and remains the backdrop for everything else. What will happen to Greenland is still unclear, but I think Trump drank champagne that same day over the failure of the Mercosur agreement. I do not rule out that a number of colleagues voted against the agreement so that Europe would, so to speak, appeal to Trump. Such motivation depresses me – America is saying outright that it wants the EU to collapse, and what are we doing?
4
On Thursday, 22 January, another vote of no confidence in Ursula von der Leyen, which has already become a familiar occurrence, was put to the vote. Parliament did not support it, which is understandable: you don't change horses midstream. I am not a fan of von der Leyen, to put it mildly, but when there are such perturbations in the world, putting the EU out of action for six months is not a great idea.
5
The plenary session is, of course, not just about one or two laws. Among the important ones, we adopted a substantive report proposing specific measures to improve the availability of essential medicines in the EU. The problem with medicine supplies also affects Estonia: according to the director of the Medicines Department, last year such problems affected 250 medicines, 70 of which could not be replaced.
We also voted not to weaken the system of compensation that airlines pay to passengers for delayed and cancelled flights. The European Commission has such an intention. Our position is clear – compensation must remain at least at the current level.
On Tuesday, I had a meeting with representatives of the EFBWW, the European Federation of Building and Woodworkers. At the next plenary session, a report on subcontractor chains and the role of intermediaries in protecting workers' rights will be put to the vote. The point is that we want to limit the length of such chains so that workers' rights are not compromised. I am the shadow rapporteur for this report.
On Wednesday morning, I participated in a trade union conference via the internet, where everyone was pleased with the adoption of the report on a just transition. In addition, I spoke twice with journalists: about the agreement with Mercosur (with colleagues, read here in Estonian) and about the directive on a just transition.