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UNI Europa opposes further Postal liberalisation through trade agreements

On 24 February 2015, UNI Europa participated in the Public Hearing of the Committee on International Trade of the European Parliament entitled: TiSA Trade in Services Agreement: what’s at stake for Europe?

Annexed you will find the Work Programme of the Public Hearing. UNI Europa’s intervention can be followed on the following web-link:http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/committees/video?event=20150224-0900-COMMITTEE-INTA from 11:44:40 onwards

UNI Europa reiterated its opposition to further liberalisation in Post & Logistics services through secretive trade negotiations. Annexed, you will find the verbatim intervention of UNI Europa:

“We have experienced now nearly two decades of deregulation and liberalisation in the sector. We have seen their effects. They are real. And they are uniformly negative. Postal liberalisation has had disastrous effects for workers and consumers alike in Latin America, Asia and, perhaps most starkly, in the European Union.

The TiSA negotiations and other trade agreements pose significant deregulatory threats for the majority of services sectors and come with a liberalisation tie-in logic, limiting the capacity of public authorities to re-regulate in the public interest. So-called ratchet and standstill clauses render the reversal of liberalisation levels impossible. TISA could even prescribe necessity tests for regulatory measures. Governments would have to prove the necessity of a regulatory instrument before implementing it. For example, in a discussion of universal coverage, a Government would have to prove the necessity of re-regulating already privatised services such as postal services.

UNI Europa is therefore reluctant to see the experience of EU postal liberalization exported elsewhere. It is important that debates concerning the future of the postal market, and other services (public services, services of general economic interest etc.), take place in open and transparent public forums, where all stakeholders – from rural and elderly consumers to workers and their trade unions – have an opportunity to engage policymakers in that debate. Postal liberalisation has failed to meet economic integration prerogatives and more importantly has limited services providers’ capacity to act in the public interest.”