Trade treaty TiSA a threat to education
When it comes to trade agreements such as TTIP, CETA or TiSA, the media mainly talks about topics such as employment, the environment, or food safety. Much less is coming out about the public sector. Yet this sector is also under threat.
The biggest threats to our industry lie in TiSA (Trade in Services Agreement), a treaty between the EU, US and 50 other countries that liberalizes the services sector. The services sector is very broad and includes financial services, transport, telecommunications - sectors that are already fully or almost completely privatized - but also public services.
The EU says that public services are excluded from the scope of this treaty, and our Foreign Trade Minister has several times in letters to the AOb emphasizes that we have nothing to fear for education. But if we look closely at the definitions in TiSa, only the police and the judiciary are really public, ie 100 percent in the hands of the government.
For years, healthcare and education have been a mixture of public and private. Despite promises and fine words, this means that considerable back doors are open to the very undesirable consequences of the trade agreement.
TiSA wants to remove trade barriers for companies and wants to offer foreign companies the same opportunities as domestic ones. It ignores the fact that many 'barriers' are rules that protect society, for example because they keep education affordable and accessible, or guarantee decent labor standards and human rights.
TiSA has a number of clauses that make matters irreversible. Like the 'standstill' clause, also known as 'lock-in': the situation with regard to liberalization as it is at the time of the conclusion of the treaty will be the basis for everything that comes after. Together with the 'ratchet' clause, this means that from that moment on there is only room for change in one direction: further liberalisation.
Because companies from the Netherlands and abroad must be able to compete 'fairly', a foreign company that wants to work in Dutch education can see the public funding of education as an unfair obstacle and fight its access to government subsidies for education through an international legal process.
When the treaty enters into force, the government will hardly be able to monitor the quality of education, because the policy space and the democratic decision-making possibilities in this regard will be increasingly limited.
Download the letter from the AOb about TiSA to Minister Ploumen
TiSA is mainly negotiated in secret. Via Wikileaks it was recently announced that negotiations will start again on November 2, and that the final negotiations should be. Urgent actions have been launched through the world and European umbrella organizations of trade unions to stop these negotiations. Sign the petition here of the FNV to call on the government to immediately disclose the Dutch position in the negotiations on TiSA, to hold consultations with trade unions and other civil society organizations and to suspend the negotiations on TiSA in the wake of TTIP.
