A proposal to strengthen the social dimension of Europe’s economic and monetary union has proven so contentious within the European Commission that its contents are still being argued over days before the draft is scheduled for adoption by the college of European commissioners.

The proposal is supposed to counter accusations that the EU is driving through an agenda of hard-line economic liberalism, but it has polarised debate within the Commission.

László Andor, the European commissioner for employment and social affairs, wants the proposal to include a mechanism to give automatic eurozone support to overburdened social security schemes in crisis-hit countries. Such a provision would run into opposition from Germany and the economic hard-liners among the EU’s member states, which will argue that it would remove incentives for reform.

Another controversial element of the proposal is a social scoreboard, which would include youth unemployment, household income, poverty and inequality. Andor wants such indicators to trigger automatic action if they reach certain values. Other commissioners, led by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the Commission, and Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs and the euro, are resisting any idea of automaticity. They fear that it would doom the proposal to rejection by the member states.

At a meeting in June, the leaders of the EU’s national government, who were then looking to dispel the impression that their prescription for economic recovery consisted solely of austerity measures, asked the Commission to come up with proposals to strengthen the social dimension of economic and monetary union.

Publication of these proposals, which were requested in time for the next EU summit on 24-25 October, was delayed until after Germany’s elections.

Andor told a conference in Brussels last week (17 September): “It should be clear that within a monetary union, with single fiscal rules and other uniform policies, some of the welfare instruments can only be rebuilt on the level of the [European] Community. This very much applies to unemployment insurance.”

The basic idea of the proposal, to be adopted next Wednesday (2 October), is uncontroversial – the inclusion of social indicators among the mainly macroeconomic and fiscal indicators used by the European Commission to monitor member states’ performance under the European semester. But the question of whether certain indicators should trigger action, and what that action might be, has divided the Commission. An official said that the Commission services did not know what would end up being put in the proposal, as various departments are still arguing over its contents.

Bernadette Ségol, the secretary-general of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), said: “If you are serious about a social dimension, these indicators should affect economic policies.”

She pointed to resistance within and outside the Commission, especially from some member states. She said that the second Barroso administration had done “basically nothing” to build “social Europe at the same time as economic Europe”.

“We are not asking that everything has to be regulated at European level, but we need a framework to avoid the downward spiral on wages and working conditions that we currently see,” she said.

Ségol was also critical of the European Council’s rhetoric on youth unemployment, which she said was so far purely declaratory and designed to distract from the leaders’ inaction on other social measures.

Maxime Cerutti, the director for social affairs at Business- Europe, which represents employers’ organisations, said that economic growth was the key to addressing social challenges in Europe and that such growth should be based on higher competitiveness, not public spending.

He said that “a proper balance” had to be found between “solidarity and a commitment to deliver reforms”. Without such a balance, European solidarity would not be acceptable to public opinion.

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