The EU.

EU trade proposals: Smugglers of social dumping
September 9, 2010 12:31 | Brian Denny and Linda Kaucher in: Europe

The threat of social dumping, where workers from nations with low labour costs are sent to another country to undercut local working norms, is set to hugely increase under new plans for the future of EU trade.

Mode 4 is a provision within the General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats) trading framework (see below) covering cross-border services trade in which workers are moved across borders. Its inclusion in the international trade agenda allows transnational corporations to profit from cross-border wage differentials, national insurance exemptions, tax juggling and other benefits of "flexible labour."

Ultimately Mode 4 undermines workers' abilities to maintain wages and conditions, loading the balance of power between labour and capital in favour of transnationals. It also reduces EU member states' democratic rights to control their own migration policies, in effect handing that power to transnationals.

The EU is offering Mode 4 access in all the trade agreements it is negotiating and has already implemented it internally via the Bolkestein Directive of 2006. In Gats's "Doha Round" negotiations, begun in 2001, the EU's revised offer, tabled in June 2005, included Mode 4 offers across service sectors. Mode 4 is a particularly secret part of the trade agenda, kept from those who will be negatively affected. These EU offers are without quotas or economic means tests.

Defenders of Mode 4 argue that it is not immigration but temporary labour movement. But this does not lessen the detrimental effects on EU workers of an influx of temporary workers who will be prohibited from becoming unionised.

As labour standards are lost in the few places they have been achieved, such as in some EU countries, it will become more difficult for workers elsewhere ever to achieve them. Once signed up to, Mode 4 openings, like all trade commitments, become effectively permanent due to the prohibitive cost of withdrawal. Current EU "investor protection" proposals increase this penalty, allowing not just other states but trans-national corporations to challenge a country's failure to fulfil its trade commitments. Successful challenges will lead to prohibitive financial compensation claims for the loss of all potential profits, called "expropriation." So when workers feel the effects of the Mode 4 commitments that have been made on their behalf, it will be too late to reverse them.

India, on behalf of its transnationals such as steel giant Tata, is demanding transnational Mode 4 access to the EU and an EU/India Free Trade agreement is currently being fast tracked. A recent report on the ongoing EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations said the "full ambition of the FTA can not be achieved without Mode 4 - which currently faces a range of barriers like wage-parity conditions."

From the other side, the EU is demanding very significant investment concessions, including banking liberalisation. The indications are that the movement of '"intracorporate transferees" will be used broadly, and with high expectations of megaprofits.

But bringing Indian workers into the EU displaces local workers and undermines established working conditions. A race to the bottom is inevitable across many sectors, as transnationals can bring in workers in whatever areas they are established, plus offer cheap, onshore outsourcing. The Indian government is arguing that the minimum wage stipulations of EU member states undermine its cheap labour "comparative advantage."

Yet even if minimum wage levels are maintained, wage competition for just the minimum wage represents intense downward pressure on labour standards for skilled EU workers. For a set of reasons - historic, linguistic and related to the liberalised British economy - workers in the UK are likely to be the most affected by EU commitments.

Notably in terms of secrecy, a recent British delegation to India, led by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, failed to even mention that an EU/India Free Trade Agreement is being rapidly negotiated, even though it was specifically focused on trade. Mode 4 is considered "sensitive" and thus kept from attention because this dimension of trade - commodifying and moving labour to increase transnational profits at workers' expense - cuts much deeper than trade in goods, or even other aspects of services.

Mode 4 can be recognised as a continuum with the attacks on workers that stem from EU "freedom of movement of services," which allows EU companies to move "posted workers" across borders at cheaper rates. Similar language and concepts of "cross-border establishment" and "movement of service suppliers" are used in both sets of rules.

This is what led to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to make anti-trade union rulings in cases such as Laval, Viking and Ruffert which, in different ways, undermined the rights of workers to protect their wages and conditions (see panel). ECJ decisions supporting firms' rights within the EU suggest Mode 4 offers "built-in" trade agreement protection.

The otherwise pro-EU British trade union federation the TUC acknowledged in a recent report that Mode 4 threatens to undermine collective bargaining, local laws and the rights of migrant workers.
The TUC also accepts the parallels with recent anti-trade union ECJ judgments but offers little in the way of action to oppose either the EU rulings or the threat posed by Mode 4.

At the same time neocolonial, unequal and neoliberal EU trade policies continue to devastate Third World economies, forcing greater proportions of the world's populations to be driven abroad in a desperate search for employment and resources.

Mode 4 does not create a single job but does hand further powers to unfettered global capital to decide who works, where and for how much.

Brian Denny works for the major British transport workers' union RMT. Linda Kaucher is a researcher in the Geography Department of the London School of Economics, focusing on international trade. This article first appeared in the Morning Star

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REASONS TO LEAVE
THE EUROPEAN UNION
1 Because the EU is for capitalism, not the working class
It was set up to enforce “free” markets – the free movement of capital, labour and
goods – to provide greater and greater profits while suppressing wages.

2 Because the EU wants to break up Britain
The EU exists to destroy national sovereignty. It was created to sweep away the
concept of nation. Nations are real. The EU drive is to dismember nations – divide and
rule to leave the field to finance capital.

3 Because the EU is a danger to peace
It is seeking to create a European Army, while inciting reaction and war on behalf of US
capitalism, for example now with Syria and Iran. The call for a European state echoes
Germany’s World War 2 aims.

4 Because the EU is a failure – and an expensive failure
It has created only chaos and destruction, while its grand plan founders on the
resistance of awkward national electorates. In 2010 our net contribution to the EU was
£9.2 billion. We can use this money for ourselves.

5 Because we can only survive and prosper outside the EU
EU trade represents just 20 per cent of global trade – we can trade with the other 80
per cent, and still trade with the EU outside it, as do Norway and Switzerland.They talk
about “little Englanders”, but in truth the “little Europeans” are perverting and
narrowing Britain’s trade and industry.

6 Because the idea of a “European people” is a lie
There is no such thing as the people of Europe. Each nation has its own people and its
own working class with its own interests to assert.

7 Because the EU is a capitalist prison
The EU shackles its inmates with 30,000 Directives and Regulations intended to govern
every aspect of our lives – imposing their laws, undermining our liberties, enforcing
privatisation of public services.

8 Because the EU is using the euro crisis to gain more power
The euro was intended to be the chain to bind the prisoners in perpetuity.With the
euro falling apart, the bureaucrats are out of control. The EU ensures banks pocket
their huge profits while workers bail out the losses incurred by their disastrous
speculation.

9 Because inside the EU we cannot control our own borders
The EU promotes the movement of vast numbers of people in search of work.
Immigration and emigration are two sides of the same problem as migration depletes
some countries of skills while undermining pay in others. They intend only
unemployment and rootlessness for us as we move from country to country.

10 Because Britain must focus on its own problems
We can make what we need, feed ourselves, control our territorial waters, trade with
the world, be a sovereign nation. They say global capitalism can’t be resisted – but look
at developments in Latin America. Like Cuba we must assert workers’ nationalism as
the true basis for internationalism. We only have to decide to do it

A book shows how countries must accept stagnant growth and unemployment levels of 20 per cent or more indefinitely – or leave the euro.

Trade imbalances and the eurozone debacle

WORKERS, MAY 2013 ISSUE
Heraklion, Crete: Greek workers demonstrate against EU-inspired cuts
Photo: Workers

The Great Rebalancing, Michael Pettis, Princeton University Press 2013 ISBN 9780691158686 £19.95



Why is the eurozone in such a mess? Is it really, as the Germans tell it, down to the bad habits of its debtor nations? One economist has uncovered a hidden reason. In his book The Great Rebalancing Michael Pettis examines capitalist political economy in 2013. His view is that like the globalisation before 1914, the globalisation of today has caused massive trade imbalances that are currently masquerading as a debt crisis within certain countries.

Among his examples is the eurozone debacle, where the consequences of domestic trade imbalances between euro countries are disguised as a debt problem within the overall euro balance sheet. Pettis calls the exporting of capital within the eurozone by certain countries tantamount to importing demand from other euro participants. For example, exporting capital from Germany to Spain has contributed towards an ever-increasing German trade surplus matched exactly by an ever-increasing Spanish trade deficit.

He describes Germany as effectively taking the same position lampooned by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 as the Republican position:

“A puzzled, somewhat sceptical Alice asked the Republican leadership some simple questions:

‘Will not the printing and selling of more stocks and bonds, the building of new plants and the increase of efficiency produce more goods than we can buy?’

‘No,’ shouted Humpty Dumpty, ‘the more we produce the more we can buy.’’

‘What if we produce a surplus?’

‘Oh we can sell it to foreign consumers.’

‘How can the foreigners pay for it?’

‘Why we will lend them the money.’

‘I see,’ said little Alice, ‘they will buy our surplus with our money. Of course these foreigners will pay us back by selling us their goods.’’

‘Oh no not at all,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘We set up a high wall called the tariff.’ (In 2013 read tariff to mean the German trade priced euro.)

‘And,’ said Alice at last, ‘how will the foreigners pay off these loans?’

‘That is easy,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘Did you ever hear of a moratorium?’”

Today’s euro equivalent of a moratorium is the EU memorandum, where the European Central Bank forces a country into re-scheduling debt built up through trade imbalance. The re-scheduling is conducted on the proviso that the debtor country agrees to cease to exist as a sovereign entity.

One of today’s Humpty Dumpties is Wolfgang Schaüble, the German Finance Minister, who said after the fall of Cyprus “I’m known for not giving in to blackmail, by nobody and nothing.” The tragedy in countries such as the Irish Republic, Spain and Portugal is that they fail to see the Alice analogy and instead want to be one of the virtuous countries that work hard, save and repay their debts and not be one of the EU “sinner states”.

‘Spendthrift’ nonsense

Imbalances caused by acquiescent government policies in both surplus and deficit euro countries cannot be unravelled by simplistic views on hard work, Pettis points out. To suggest that a country runs a trade deficit because its working class are spendthrift, lazy and save too little is nonsense. “A nation’s cultural preferences towards saving,’’ he says, “are irrelevant because EU policies have deliberately altered the domestic relationship between investment and savings.’’ Realising where their EU policies would eventually lead, today’s Humpty Dumpties cloak their attack with prattle about blackmail.

The book is also careful to point out that although Germany has low debt and a high trade surplus, German workers during the coming period will be highly exposed to a fall in effective product demand. Pettis explains that France in the early 1930s was in a similar position. He cites comments made by an analyst at the time:

“One of the reasons for which opinion abroad admires the French people is their resistance to the world economic depression. France’s harmonious economic structure and the prompt measures taken by the authorities have facilitated this resistance. The natural prudence of the French people, their ability to adapt, their modernity, and their courage have contributed equally.”

Conditions quickly changed. Demand for French goods vanished and very soon the French economy was in a shambles and was forced off the Gold Standard in a chaotic devaluation.

Pettis in his book shows that euro moralisers propounding populist economic thinking are really saying that peripheral countries must accept stagnant growth and unemployment levels of 20 per cent or more indefinitely, or leave the euro.

The moralisers have spotted the contradiction in the minds of many European workers – although they rail against unemployment and wage repression, they have so far failed to grasp the nettle of euro exit, instead continuing to align themselves with their national ruling class in considering that option as even more unpalatable. Hence the now ex-Cypriot Finance Minister Michael Sarris was able to say, “Cyprus has avoided a disastrous exit from the eurozone.”

Workers’ lack of confidence to take the only realistic option available and force a euro exit has led to a dangerous situation that allows the ruling class to press home its attack. This trait can also be seen in Britain, although the euro cheerleaders have had their guns spiked.

A number of British trade unions still align themselves with the British ruling class and its political parties in wanting to remain in the EU. Downward wages, high unemployment and the break-up of nations are all EU prerequisites. In reality euro recovery is a false promise and it must be dawning on even the most economically befuddled that the EU is the antithesis of British trade unionism.

Pettis (who is not a Marxist-Leninist), has made a similar contribution to that of John Hobson, whose book Imperialism: A Study in 1902 was among the publications that prompted Lenin to write Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916.

Pettis not only examines the euro but also analyses various forms of trade intervention, the US/Chinese trade relationship and the role of the US dollar as the dominant reserve currency. Much of his analysis rests on counter-intuitive thinking that reveals massive flaws in current populist economic views particularly concerning the capitalist balance of trade mechanism. This makes a refreshing change to the trite nonsense written about economics so often found elsewhere.

This month we look at two books – one short and one longer – that grapple with the two key issues facing Britain today: the European Union, and industry...



A farewell to the EU – and how industry starved to death



WORKERS, MAR 2013 ISSUE



Time to bail out? The end of the European Dream, by Paul Dixon, paperback, 50 pages, ISBN 9781478193074, published by Paul Dixon, 2012, £3.99.



In this brilliant and original little book, freelance writer Paul Dixon shows why the euro was always going to fail, why further EU integration will, and should, fail, why we need an in/out referendum, and why Britain needs to leave the EU.



He notes, “That three attempts to lock sterling into external exchange rates should have led to four financial crises and subsequent devaluations [1931, 1949, 1967 and 1992] ought to have served as a warning to anyone intending on signing up for an exchange rate which, to all intents and purposes, would be permanent.”



He points out the simple fact that it is not possible to operate a single currency, with one interest rate and uniform fiscal restrictions across 17 entirely separate sovereign states, each with their own political agendas and economic needs. He urges a return to the drachma as the only possible recourse for the Greek Government, pointing out that the longer it waits to do this the greater the ultimate cost to both the Greek people and the other Eurozone economies.



Instead, the EU, led by Germany and backed by Cameron, wants greater integration, both economically and ultimately politically, as the only option available which could preserve the euro in its current guise. But this is unwanted, undemocratic and impractical. As Dixon observes, “the right of democratic nations to choose their own government, and for that government to then run their country as mandated by the electorate, would be eroded in the event of greater European political integration ...”



He remarks, “National identities are here to stay and by imposing financial hardships, neutralising national parliaments and even foisting unelected governments upon countries, the EU is only stoking the fire of nationalism.”



The EU commitment to the free movement of labour also raises important questions. Within a year, by EU order, Britain will have to open its borders to the entire populations of Bulgaria and Romania, whose current unemployment levels are 12.4 per cent and 7 per cent respectively.



This potential mass immigration from Eastern Europe is not to meet our economic or social needs, but to obey the EU’s diktat. Immigration is an economic issue. A greater supply of labour will force wages down even further and put more strain on our housing, healthcare and education. Dixon notes, “It is important...to reflect that a sense of pride in one’s own country, a feeling that your own culture, national characteristics, and achievements are precious and should not be ignored, downplayed or forgotten, does not make an individual inherently racist or bigoted.”



We need an in/out referendum. The parliamentary parties don’t want to let the British people have a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EU or leave it. They are terrified of the answer that we would give.



Surrender: how British industry gave up the ghost 1952-2012, by Nicholas Comfort, hardback, 354 pages, ISBN 978-1849541459, Biteback Publishing, 2012, £20.




Fighting against factory closure at Plessey in Bathgate, near Edinburgh, 1982

Photo: Workers


The Labour Party has bought into the big lie that it does not matter who owns companies. But, as Nicholas Comfort points out in his survey, foreign ownership means that “when a British plant is doing well, the profits flow overseas – and when it does badly, there is nothing to stop the owners closing it down or transferring production somewhere cheaper. Decisions on where and whether to invest – and, of equal importance, to continue to invest – are taken abroad.”



Comfort notes that foreign ownership is promoted by investment banks. “In Britain, the moment an investment bank gets close to a family-owned company it encourages it to float on the Stock Exchange, paving the way for a takeover by a foreign competitor – with the bankers taking a hefty commission from both transactions and the national interest the loser.”



Comfort deplores the importing of cheap labour when the need was for higher productivity, also the short-termism of the City and the Treasury, and near-suicidal exchange rate policies. Tight financial policies force the pound up, making our exports less competitive. As he points out, the priority given to defeating inflation causes lasting damage to industry and society.



The Korean War “forced Britain, among others, to divert resources from civilian manufacturing into armaments – and in Britain’s case reduced home demand through a round of fiscal belt-tightening which not only hastened the defeat of the Labour government at the end of 1951, but proved after the event to have been largely unnecessary.”



He observes that Thatcher’s privatisations had an impact on manufacturing industry when centralised procurement or arrangements with a single supplier were abandoned, opening up everything from buses to telecoms equipment. Where this happened, “established British manufacturers from Leyland to Plessey were the sufferers.”



The Labour Party has also bought into the big lie that finance is more important than manufacturing industry. Comfort writes, “the reluctance of the banks to support any potentially productive venture when there are greater bonuses to be earned through the rashest forms of speculation remains a significant brake, not only on manufacturing companies’ expansion but all too often on their survival.”

www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_1113/eu.html

Almost the entire political establishment, from coalition and Labour leaders to the TUC, may all unite to hold back the tide of opinion demanding a referendum. We must stop them...

Why we need an EU referendum now

WORKERS, NOV 2013 ISSUE

Thanks to the rare success of a private member’s bill (304 to 0 – Labour and Lib Dems largely stayed away), Cameron has been forced to offer a conditional referendum on the EU in 2017: conditional on his party getting back into power in 2015. The question will be “Do you think Britain should remain in the EU?” Cameron himself made it clear he would vote to stay in.


The headquarters of the European Commission, Brussels
Photo: Workers

In fact almost the entire political establishment from coalition and Labour leaders to the TUC may all unite to hold back the tide of opinion demanding a referendum. Those who have their snouts in the EU trough don't want to take the risk of losing their tasty pigswill.

Some try to say we have had the debate on Europe ever since 1973 after Heath took us in. But how many people under 55 feel they have had the chance to say what they think of the EU now? There are many ways of closing down debate and one is to say we have talked about that enough.

Unions in their sights

The unions managed to put off – for the time being – the EU-inspired recommendations in the Beecroft Report, welcomed by Vince Cable, for collective bargaining at a national level to be terminated and for unfair dismissal rules to be abolished, to be replaced with simple notice of redundancy.

But the EU’s sights are still fixed on our trade unions. In Brussels they call it “High Noon for Social Europe”, the moment of truth. In the Eurozone as a whole, according to the Eurobarometer poll, the number who do not trust the EU has doubled, including 68 per cent of Brits. Only 15 per cent in Britain support the euro. The Spanish minister Barroso calls us “political extremists” and “populists”. All the Commission can respond with is more proposals for wage erosion, copying the Irish and the Latvians – such a success story with their wage cuts, job losses, low growth!

So long as we remain in the EU – whether in the euro or not – we will be subject to the same pressures as those in the eurozone. Ideas which have flowed from Europe include automatic wage indexation controlled by employers, the discouraging of workers from comparing wages with company profits, local pay setting, the notion of the “working poor”, tax breaks for living wage employers, living wage cities, living wage zones sponsored by Christian charities, and Fairness Commissions promoted by Labour and lazy trade unions...

Non-working class organisations have sprung up in the vacuum left by the unions, and the implication is: don't bother with unions, we’ll get you a minimum wage (though it will have no legal force), and no more bargaining, no more fighting for what you collectively decide you are worth.

These patronising ideas are alien to British working class traditions. They are designed to eradicate class consciousness and struggle, and encourage dependency, fulfilling the aims of the Commission as set out in various papers. Who is to say what we need to live on, other than workers banding together? We are allowing ourselves to be taken back to the 1800s.


The European Council, Brussels, where ministers meet to rubber-stamp decisions.

Photo: European Council

There is no longer any excuse for refusing to acknowledge that the so-called freedom of movement, including move-ment of labour – immigration, economic migration – is essentially about suppress-ing wages, the first and most primitive attack of capitalism on the working class.

No wages, maximum profit, is the logic of capitalism. No one should be surprised at the revelations of zero hours contracts. The lowering of wages is not just incidental to membership of the EU, not merely an unfortunate spin-off – it is deliberate, it is one of the things the EU was created for.

Proclaiming itself above the nations of Europe, the European Union is a mechanism for maintaining a perpetual army of cheap foreign labour to add to the British pool of unemployed, which historically was always engineered from time to time to restore profits.

In the process, standards are lowered, including professional qualifications. Higher national standards than the EU norm are regarded as anti-competitive. Distance learning rather than hands-on training, is a tool to normalise cross-border activity.

“Freedom of movement” is actually a myth. The movement is real enough – but the freedom is an illusion!

Why stick with it?

With all this evidence before them, why do our unions stubbornly cling to the EU?

Opinion polls during the year show a majority may vote NO should there be a referendum – but not a big enough majority to enable us to rest on our laurels. If anything the polls show that we have much work to do to convince a significant minority. And at TUC conferences no union, even the RMT, has yet dared risk defeat by proposing an exit from the EU.

Our Party says “Referendum Now!”, sooner rather than later. It is a long time to wait till 2017 and a lot can happen in that time – the Scottish referendum, and both European and British elections. All who want independence for Britain, the restoration of Britain’s borders, manufacturing, and housing that young people can afford, are allies in this referendum, and should not be denigrated. There are waverers too, frightened by dire warnings of loss of jobs and trade – for which there is no evidence. Although the phrase is “trade with Europe”, we still trade with individual member states.

Employment rights

As for loss of employment rights enshrined in the Social Chapter, or protective directives such as the Working Time Directive, these have been shown to be an illusion, or at best problematic and unsuited to the particular situations British workers and service providers face.

We must seek to inspire confidence that there can be a future outside the EU. We should think carefully about all the different sorts of people that make up the working class, and why they think the way they do, including small manufacturers fighting for survival in the teeth of the transnationals. Many SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) want to leave the EU, then negotiate a trade deal with it.

Contemplating the stages people go through towards grasping the implications of the EU, and how hostility to it has deepened over the years, we get a mental flash of the EU as a 21st-century version of Dante’s Inferno, with its nine Circles of Hell.

Dante is taken on a journey of increasing political awareness of the greed, fraud, treachery and violence among the politicians of his day. He is accompanied by his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, who first shows him a roomful of uncommitted people, including philosophers, writers and academics – the chattering classes of the ancient world. They are in Limbo, a sort of anteroom to Hell, unable to make up their minds which side they are on, if any.

Is that still the state of half the working class? Are people cynical, inured to corruption everywhere? At home they see MPs, police, judges, bankers. But how much more difficult it is to root out corruption thousands of miles away.

Are some sections still uncommitted because they see the EU merely as a bureaucratic irritant rather than a serious danger? Those early bureaucratic directives – the size of the British pint, the precise curvature of bananas – were really the opening salvos in the attack on our sovereignty. (And no laughing matter for one greengrocer, the so-called metric martyr, who was driven to suicide.)

Do workers believe that the more unpalatable aspects of the EU can be sweetened, reformed?

Competences

It is clear already from Hague’s Balance of Competences Review that the government will get the answers it wants. It’s obvious that if they only consult big corporate groups like the CBI, or the Russell Group of universities, or the TUC, they are bound to get broad support for staying in. But this exercise does not reach the worker in the street, or the rank and file union members trying to protect their jobs. It is intended to obstruct and reconfigure popular opinion before the referendum.

The TUC questions Hague’s methodology, but clings to the old illusions: More Social Europe please. Please sir, can we have some more? Pathetic supplication! Frances O’Grady at Congress says: “Stick together and neoliberalism will take its last gasp.” What do they think the EU is about?

Cameron’s renegotiation and repatriation of competences will yield negligible results. He will return from Berlin waving a piece of paper. There will be protection for bankers, nothing for workers. Immigration, crime and red tape will be mentioned, but not resolved.

Re-negotiation will not touch the fundamentals of overarching EU power such as free movement of labour. We may yet need to consider ways of leaving without a referendum. Labour and the Lib Dems will be able to oppose a referendum on the grounds that there has been no material change in our relationship with the EU.

This masks the fact that the material change took place years ago, with the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties intended as the definitive blow against the concept of a sovereign nation. This should be the referendum on the EU Constitution, the referendum we never had. It should be the British people’s judgement on the weasel way our governments have wriggled out of consulting their people.



The legacy of Thatcherism, the lifting of exchange controls, paved the way for EU liberalisation, for Germany’s success. The EU with its rules on state aid and procurement did the opposite of liberating Britain. It has attempted to force the break-up of British industry – war by other means.



In the real world (as opposed to Dante’s vision) it is not the rich and greedy, the warmongers, the fraudsters, the traitors who are suffering, it is the exploited working class.

So, where are we today? We know that democracy plays no part within the EU. Britain should take a leaf out of Iceland’s book, where both parties recently campaigned and voted against EU membership. Their foreign minister said: “This is how democracy works.”

We are now out of the comfort zone of Hell's waiting room, but not so far down the pit that we can’t get out. However, first the working class has to recognise how grim the alternative will be. Make the connections. Not see just a little piece of the jigsaw and think the other pieces don't matter. To vote out, they have to want to get out.

We have a duty, in our unions and other organisations, to act the guide like Virgil to show the doubters why they must get out. ■


This article is an edited version of a speech given at a CPBML public meeting in London in September.

Jilted by the European Commission

WORKERS, DEC 2013 ISSUE

The TUC and trade union love affair with the European Union began in the dark days of Thatcher, when then-President of the European Commission Jacques Delors addressed Congress and said Europe would save them from Thatcherism. It was always a false boast. Now even the boasting has stopped.

Under the REFIT (“Regulatory Fitness and Performance”) proposals the Commission will review EU legislation on workers’ rights. In language familiar to British ears it talks of “easing the burden” on business and of making EU law “lighter and simpler”.

It’s doing this by “streamlining” directives on information and consultation rights in collective redundancies and business transfers (in particular, the transfer directive known as TUPE), despite a recent review concluding they were “fit for purpose”. Nothing that could even slightly get in the way of capital is to remain.

Plans to extend these rights to smaller companies and the public sector have been shelved, permanently. Nor will the Commission be going ahead with legislation on illness or injuries associated with screen displays, tobacco smoke or carcinogens. And there will be no legislation on health and safety in hairdressing which had been agreed between unions and employers.

The European Trade Union Confederation says it only accepted the internal market on the proviso that there would be strong “social” rules. More fool it, and more fool anyone who believes in the EU.
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Maybe me just getting old and corny...."If anything looks too good to be true--it probably is." Certainly was with the EU...TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Didn't mummy tell me?