Newsletter No. 27
APRIL / MAY 2005
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Eastern Europe: can labour outflank capital’s outflanking moves? Volkswagen claims to pay an extra $1,400 per car to build in Germany rather than Eastern Europe, or Portugal, the low cost destination for automakers prior to the 2004 European Union expansion that added ten new eastern European members. Even Portugal’s workers are under threat from eastern Europe’s even lower wages and more flexible hours. ‘If you don’t produce here there is a country in Eastern Europe to do it’ says the president of General Motors Portugal (P'guese auto industry .. competition) The EU expansion means firms in western Europe can more easily shift operations to the lower-wage, longer hours East, which has largely ‘restructured’ on neo-liberal lines, and to bulldoze union resistance to corporate demands for a longer work week at same or less pay. Employer interests are now extricating unions from the ‘political and economic fabric’ in which they are ‘deeply entwined’ (Unions begin to struggle in Europe USA Today 11.04). European imperialism is competing with its American and Asian rivals, to ‘make the EU the leading economic area world-wide’(see Lisbon Process), so is building EU military capability and driving to diminish wages and conditions in the West, using the East’s ‘liberalised’ work & social conditions as a lever. European unions’ efforts to curb this trend through agreements with business and governments to protect rights in Eastern Europe are frequently subverted or overridden, driving central and eastern European workers increasingly to revolt (see ICFTU CEE network bulletins). Romanian unions for instance, are united for the first time since 1990 to oppose a new neo-liberal work code brewed up by the ‘most… powerful employers’ organisations and foreign investors in Romania’ that overthrows a 2003 ILO-compliant code adopted after ‘intense dialogue between social partners’. The unions took part in a recent 60,000 strong demonstration in Brussels called by the European Trade Union Federation. Can labour in Europe unite, within Europe and with labour forces outside Europe, where its capital is now shifting, to block and overturn these moves to undercut the world’s most advanced labour and social standards? The prospects are good, but the struggle is also critical for both forces thoughout the world. |