According to the 2008 survey for European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC 2008), there are 150,000 people in Austria living in a household that has no current account.

AK considers the expansion of ADR schemes to be an important contribution to enforcing consumers’ legal rights and therefore warmly welcomes the actions taken by the Commission in this area.

The draft basic Data Protection Regulation put forward by the EU Commission early in 2012 was discussed by the advisory working group concerned, DAPIX, for the first time at the end of February. The Federal Chamber of Labour (BAK) is grateful to you for providing the report on the meeting and takes this opportunity to comment as follows on the proposed Regulation.

On Wednesday, the EU Commission presented a proposal for a Directive which shall help to improve the implementation of the so-called Posting of Workers Directive. The need for action exists because workers living in the EU, who are temporarily posted to another EU country, are frequently confronted with wage and social dumping. The aim of the Commission is to improve the cooperation of national authorities and to make the implementation of workers’ rights easier. However, the planned restriction of national Control options must be viewed with a critical eye.

According to experts at a hearing in the European Parliament, at European level, water supply and disposal, district heating, energy services, refuse collection, social and health care services as well as culture and education are often provided within the scope of so-called service concessions. Now a new legal framework will be set up for contracts, concluded between the public sector and private companies.

Financial institutions, which undertake bank-like transactions, but operate outside the regular banking sector, represent a growing market in Europe. However, the activities of shadow banks, such as investment funds and finance companies entail enormous risks, which could spill over into the entire banking sector. Based on a Green Paper, the EU Commission now wants to start a public consultation in order to clarify, what shadow banks actually are and how their regulation and supervision could be improved.

On 13 March, the EU Finance Ministers discussed their positions on the EU Financial Transaction Tax. The result is sobering: it comes as no surprise that the opponents of an EU-wide tax on shares, bonds and derivatives - led by Great Britain and Sweden - are still refusing to agree to the plan. Apart from clarifying still unresolved issues concerning the Commission proposal, the Finance Ministers now want to look for alternatives. The danger is that the search for a compromise will produce a watered down “Mini Tax”.

This week, the Statistical Office of the European Communities EUROSTAT published the latest unemployment figures for the European Union as at January 2012. The results of the reviews of the EU labour market are alarming: within only four years, the number of persons unemployed increased from 16.1 to 24.3 million or by more than 50 percent. As at January 2012, the EU unemployment rate stands at 10.1 percent. The youth unemployment situation is a disaster: 22.4 percent of young people aged between 15 and 24 are unemployed - the highest level since records began.

The Free Trade Agreement of the EU with Peru and Colombia was scrutinised during a hearing in the Trade Committee of the European Parliament. Whilst EU Trade Commissioner De Gucht praised the Agreement as the engine for growth for the European economy and the Latin American countries involved, the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas argued that the Agreement hardly took any social, labour related and ecological issues into consideration.

On 13 March, the Finance Ministers of the EU states will discuss the possibility of introducing an EU Financial Transaction Tax. The campaign for the urgently needed EU-wide Financial Transaction Tax organised by the Chamber of Labour (AK) and the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB) - in cooperation with a broad alliance of European organisations - now enters its decisive phase.