IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
Social Europe or Europe Inc.?
Posted to the IUF website 18-Dec-2000Share this article.
Over 70,000 European trade unionists rallied at an EU summit in Nice on December 6 to show their support for a "social Europe". The demonstration, organized by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), was an impressive achievement both in numerical terms and for bringing together a large contingent of unionists from the candidate countries of Eastern and Central Europe with their EU counterparts. It failed, however, to have any significant impact on decision-makers inside the conference hall. The European Council assembled at Nice refused to adopt the "European Charter of Fundamental Rights" as a binding text to be incorporated into EU law.
Union supporters had hoped the Charter would become a vehicle for establishing the legal framework of an EU-wide system of industrial relations. The Charter in its current form, however, brings us no closer to this goal. It does, on the other hand, provide a telling illustration of the extent to which corporate Europe is still driving the EU agenda.
Over the past decade, the quickening pace of globalization, privatization, mergers and concentration has significantly strengthened the position of the employers, while union bargaining power has been eroded through layoffs, restructuring, casualization and subcontracting. This unfavorable shift in the balance of social forces has occured despite union efforts to develop an extensive EU "social dialogue" with European employers.
It is symptomatic of the changing social and political landscape that 14 years were required to dilute the original Vredeling proposals for European Works Councils and completely eliminate the words "trade union" from the final Directive establishing these bodies, but a mere ten months were all that was needed to strip the Charter of all language that would have marked an advance on earlier texts. In the Charter article setting out the right of collective bargaining and action - crucial to a project purporting to establish the indivisibility of social, political and cultural rights as the foundation of EU law - "all" gave way to "appropriate" levels in defining the scope of this right. Article 28 of the text adopted at Nice now reads: "Workers and employers, or their respective organizations, have, in accordance with Community law and national laws and practices, the right to negotiate and conclude collective agreements at the appropriate levels and, in cases of conflicts of interest, to take collective action to defend their interests, including strike action."
This formulation does not significantly broaden trade union rights as they are currently defined in a European Union dedicated in theory and practice to the free movement of capital, goods and services. In many EU countries, it is illegal for unions to strike in sympathy - even with other workers in a plant of the same transnational. In the countries where it is technically legal, it is so restricted as to be all but impossible to exercise without exposing union funds to employer legal claims. Grounding the right to strike in "national laws and practices", in the absence of explicit guarantees of this right at European level, locks the European trade union movement into a position of institutionalized weakness vis-�-vis mobile employers whose right to invest (and disinvest), downsize, rationalize and transfer production across borders is enshrined in a formidable apparatus of European-level jurisprudence.
European unions must be guaranteed the right to organize and to strike across national borders, including the right to strike in solidarity, if they are to effectively challenge the power of increasingly global employers in a Europe dominated by the logic of the market. Upward, not downward, harmonization of the right to strike is needed for this right to be securely and effectively exercised. The Charter adopted at Nice merely transposes into legal terms the established practice of transnational companies, i.e. that of implementing strategic investment decisions at international level, while attempting to limit to the local level the ability of workers to challenge the consequences of these decisions.
The demand for the right of European unions to take sympathy action to support workers in other countries has formed part of the ETUC program since 1991, but has too often been left on the back burner. It is time to reactivate this demand in the light of the Nice setback. If we are serious about constructing a "social Europe", we must acquire the means to build it. The BSE crisis has shown, among other things, that we are still very far from a social Europe worthy of the name, for a social Europe can only mean a safe Europe - safe for workers, consumers, and the environment.
An EU-wide campaign for the unrestricted right to strike in solidarity across frontiers has received a powerful boost from Sweden's three national trade union centers LO, TCO, and SACO, who are calling on the Swedish government - which holds the EU presidency for the first half of 2001 - to push for the incorporation of this right into the European Treaty. Their commitment to this issue deserves the active support of IUF affiliates and national centers across Europe and beyond.