Helsinki (08.02.2003 - Juhani Artto) In late January some 60 representatives of trade unions and NGOs gathered at the Parliament of Finland. They were there to voice their demands, proposals and questions about the international service trade negotiations that seek to reform the global service trade rules expressed in the 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
Minister for Foreign Trade Jari Vilén, the Members of Parliament responsible for monitoring GATS issues, and civil servants specialising in trade questions were all present to outline recent developments in the negotiations and to respond to the questions posed by the activists.
Less than a year ago barely anybody could have envisioned such a meeting taking place so soon. Only a handful of experts and activists in trade unions and NGOs had any better knowledge of the many and complex issues of the GATS arrangement. Since then several public sector unions and NGOs have worked actively on GATS. This activity has included studying, educating, publishing and lobbying.
This process has rapidly increased the number of activists with a fair grasp of the core issues in international service trade, and especially of the present threats that the GATS negotiations pose to essential public services such as education, health care and water supplies. The larger audience, however, is far from knowing even the basics of GATS, as the mass media have almost totally ignored the issue.
The Trade Union for the Municipal Sector KTV has, together with the other public sector unions, lobbied above all for caution in opening up services to foreign competition. The vague manner in which public services are defined in GATS has worried the trade unions in this connection. Although the stated scope of the agreement excludes public services, certain other parts of the agreement are indirectly in conflict with this. This means that the single undertaking procedure applied, whereby nothing is approved until everything has been approved, involves a risk that unintended elements will be included in the compromise in the final stage of the negotiations.
Jarkko Eloranta, the head of the KTV communication and public affairs department, points out that although GATS includes a commitment to perform an impact analysis of the agreement, no such analysis has been made. He stresses that the analysis is still needed.
Eloranta repeated the call for greater transparency in the negotiation process. Last year Finnish activists involved in GATS lobbying were amazed to discover that even the MPs who were supposed to be monitoring the GATS negotiations closely had received no detailed information on the process. For example they had received only a summary, but not copies of the demands addressed to the EU by some twenty countries, and of the demands made by the EU to more than one hundred WTO Member States.
Peter Boldt, a trade expert at SAK, pointed out that while GATS entails no obligation to privatise, any liberalisation implemented by a government in some service trade category cannot easily be revoked by a succeeding government. He was also critical of service delivery mode 4: "This does not mean free movement of labour, but the right for enterprises to tender services. This makes labour in the service trades a commodity, which is against the principles of the ILO and opens up routes for virtual trade in human beings."
Last spring, when the GATS movement in Finland was still in its infancy, the much-publicised leak of secret European Commission GATS documents helped to mobilise Finnish activists. Attac and Friends of Earth were the principal NGOs that have actively strengthened public awareness and movement around the GATS issues.