muckles:
Rjan:
muckles:
In principle the rules might protect those workers who’d like to stay in the WTD, but the reality many workers opt out due to pressure and fear losing their job if they cause a fuss over opting out.
But that’s not the fault of the EU. The British can put in place an employment inspectorate to actually police and enforce the law, or encourage unionisation to prevent the victimisation of individuals.
I didn’t say it was the fault of the EU, I said being in the EU hasn’t stopped a decline in UK workers rights.
No, not all of them, but that’s because the EU does not specify minimum standards for every single important employment right, and Britain (like the other nations) remains essentially sovereign to determine its own.
Rjan:
muckles:
Rjan:
Indeed. All problems due to Britain’s uniquely weak employment laws which it has full control over.
If staying in the EU would save us from this, we wouldn’t be in this position after 40+ years of membership, so it’s not about being in or out of the EU, it’s about a changing the political bias of the UK.
Indeed. But it’s still not a reason for leaving the EU - I’m just highlighting an example where EU law is truly saving workers from their own nationally-elected right-wing governments.
I haven’t said leaving the EU would solve the problems, I haven’t advocated leaving, my argument is that the EU isn’t a pro worker system that many hail it to be, it’s as much for the free market, deregulation and globalisation as the Tory party, which is why many in the Tory party support EU membership as do many of the organisations that promote the economic system we have and that has increased the gap between those on average wages and the richest.
Well maybe I should define more closely what it is that I’m hailing about the EU. Firstly, it isn’t “free market” to a greater extent than the Tory party, because it does have internal rules (“deregulation” or the forcing down of wages is not its guiding principle), and it doesn’t trade freely outside its own borders. Furthermore, it has the potential to implement more common rules effectively in a way that individual nations simply cannot, and that will also be good for workers - such as by limiting tax avoidance by multinational corporations and eliminating low-tax havens which capture the wealth created in democratic nations, but operate outside the control of those democratic nations whose wealth they sap. An example is Ireland recently, which has been ordered to collect billions in tax from Apple, having being found to be undercutting the EU tax rules.
Rjan:
muckles:
What about EU treaties being used in court against workers who want to stop companies flagging out operations to EU countries to reduce wage costs?
Do you have many, or any, specific examples of what the operation was and where it went?
In the cases of the Viking Line and Laval, workers tried to contest their employers replacing them with lower-paid workers from Estonia. The European Court of Justice ruled in favour of employers rather than workers, stating the the workers were in breach of rights to freedom of movement in one case and freedom of establishment in another.
And this now has legal precedence
So it was used by British Airways to stop pilots striking against plans to set up a subsidiary in another EU country with worse terms and conditions
and can be used against any other group of workers where the bosses can prove industrial action conflicts with the fundamental freedoms of the EU.
In a different situation the French government dismantled Truck driver’s blockades, when they were threatened with legal action by the EU, over freedom of movement of goods and services.
But what stops airlines within Britain setting up to undercut pay and conditions - the low-budget airlines? Nothing, because closed shops and secondary picketing are outlawed, and there are no wage councils that cover the entire British airline industry. So BA pilots have just as much competition from low-paid pilots at Easyjet and Ryanair, as from anywhere else.
And what stops a completely independent airline setting up in Estonia (using money invested by the British rich, or by the rich from anywhere in the world), and then flying into Britain on the same routes as BA (if we accept the rights of other countries to fly into Britain, which under any regime, we will have to as the mutual bargain of us flying into theirs)?
Where there is no inherent national locality to the operation (like with international air travel), what sort of system of trade can you conceive, which is mutually-agreeable with other nations, that preserves the ability of our high-wage pilots to fly out, but stops their low-wage pilots flying in?
The only feasible option I can see is to have industry quotas, so that each nation gets a fair bite of the cherry in the marketplace - and we have that in things like the fishing industry. But where it involves several countries, then it has to be coordinated and enforce at a higher level - an EU level, if it concerns purely intra-European flights, and a world level if it involves worldwide flights.
And the problem is, the last time we had an anti-free-market government was the 1970s, so to the extent that we could have had more quotas to protect British industry, domestic Tory politicians have stubbornly resisted them (because they don’t want quotas, they enjoy the profits they can derive by threatening workers with replacement if they don’t accept lower wages).
Rjan:
When was the last time a local driving job got shipped off to Spain?
Although not part of my point I will reply to this bit, As with other places in the EU including the UK
there are plenty of Freight forwarders in Spain who now use Bulgarian and Romanian Hauliers to pull their trailers, despite unemployment in Spain being around the 12% mark, which is what it was in the UK during the 80’s.
But that’s not going to be stopped by Britain leaving the EU, and doesn’t seem to concern any British interest. To be clear I’m not trying to argue that the principle isn’t there, I’m just trying to put it in proportion - some economic rough has to be accepted along with the smooth if we want to trade internationally.
Rjan:
And there is of course a quid pro quo of activity coming to the UK, such as BMW factories - it’s not all moving outwards, and there is mutuality.
BMW didn’t bring production to the UK, they bought Rover then sold off everything, which lead to the closure of factories, except the Mini operation, a car that they also make in other parts of the EU.
BMW do build engines here, and Rover was independently bankrupt (in keeping with the traditions of British car production). But even if you want to argue that they’re merely taking over production that happened here anyway, that’s always going to be a factor when production consolidates - the point is the place to which it is consolidating, which in this case, is to Britain, and Britain exports almost all of the cars that it makes (it doesn’t predominantly serve the domestic car market). The same is true of the Japanese car brands, who have factories in Britain, but export widely (including to the rest of the EU, because there are no import tariffs to protect other EU carmakers from British imports).
If car factories had to serve only the domestic market, many of them would either become uneconomic through lack of scale, or unit costs would be higher, or some combination of the two, because Britain simply makes far more cars than it can consume domestically.
And even if Britain has long had a large export market for cars (I don’t have the statistics), so that it hasn’t gained any market share from being in the EU, the point is that it might have lost it all if it had remained outside the EU from the 1970s, because then manufacturers would have had to pay export tariffs, and it would have made more sense to wind down production in Britain, and move production onto the continent entirely to be within the European free-trade zone. So in that analysis, whilst Britain has gained nothing additional from being in the EU (compared to its historic norm), it has saved itself from the loss it would have incurred by failing to join what otherwise would have been a collective economic project of the other EU nations (which they would have pursued anyway, with or without Britain being a member).
Rjan:
The only effective way to stop what you describe would be to return to the tariffs and capital controls of the pre-1970s era, where bosses literally cannot take money or machinery off the shores of Britain, and literally cannot import things made anywhere else in the world without paying a tariff charge, which is what protects the competitiveness of domestic industry. And I say again, not in your wildest dreams do the Tories propose this, and it would not even be an EU-specific policy, because it is the developing world where most of British industry has gone, to China and to India, not to other EU countries.
So you’re happy with increased globalisation and free trade systems, where politicians are at the beck and call of multi national corporations and the global financial system instead of the electorate they are supposed to represent.
No, I want to see corporations at the beck and call of an EU electorate. There are nations with electorates that are comparable the size of the EU, including the USA, and there are undemocratic nations that are accountable to ever larger populations (like China) which exert effective political control over their corporations.
Rjan:
Even on the issue of migration from Eastern Europe, there were protections available - the Blair government decided not to implement them, And I’ve spoken before about the other protections available, including wage councils, collective bargaining, which prevent bosses using migrants to undercut
And yet more proof of my point, being in or out of the EU makes no difference to our workers rights, so it’s no point thinking the EU is going to solve our problems, it’s up to us, the electorate, to change that.
I suppose I can agree with that, but the point I’m trying to get across is that the EU imposes no real constraints on the protection of our workers (no constraints that would not be present in any international trading scenario), and that much of what the working-class Brexiteers are complaining about, like wage undercutting in workplaces that serve the domestic market, are things that are fully under the control of British lawmakers.
As far as I understand it, the only left-wing policy that is hampered by current EU rules (and this is where the Labour Brexiteers come from I think), is related to investment in and management of state monopolies. And that is not because the EU is against state investment, it is to try and prevent countries using their tax-raising powers to subsidise the cost of production and unfairly undermine the competitiveness of other EU nations who aren’t subsidising, and to prevent countries using their rule-making powers to hamper trade and favour domestic industry axiomatically at the cost of industry in other EU states (such as would happen where the state forms a vertically-integrated monopoly, and has a policy of doing all its production in Britain regardless of its cost - like a railway monopoly that has a specific rule of buying trains only from British train-makers, without any regard to whether train-makers elsewhere in the EU could offer the same quality for the same money).
That is not an unreasonable rule to have - after all, Brits would be outraged if the British government itself had a policy of only buying from train-makers in Scotland, and not train-makers in England and Wales. You’d expect the government to treat its regions fairly and trade fairly between them.
Rjan:
And there are new EU rules underway at the moment to control undercutting, because other countries like Germany and France are also sick of the effects of free movement in the free market being used predominantly to undercut domestic wage rates, rather than any legitimate goal of encouraging trade and sharing skills and cultures.
So despite the policies in place in other parts of Europe, they have also suffered from an influx of cheap labour, and now realise they have to do something about it. And these new EU policies started as policies in individual countries not as an EU wide initiative, Also what has pushed them into action? It’s pressure from national unions and workers groups, not some EU ideal for workers rights, the EU have been pushed into it, we can do the same.
But do you note the difference here, that Germany for example is pushing for a change to EU law, not to leave the EU? It’s like the difference between going on strike to change pay and conditions, and simply resigning with no other job to go to (or going to other jobs on the same pay and conditions that you are rejecting by resigning).
Rjan:
muckles:
What about Macron wanting to remove hard won rights from French workers in the name of deregulation and global competition?
Macron is the French President, a nationally-elected politician in France! Not an EU functionary.
Macron is also one of the very influential politicians within the EU, as he is the leader of one of the main nations in it.
And so are we. Leaving the EU will not increase our influence over it, nor over any of its constituent member states. And because leaving the EU allows them to impose tariffs, whatever influence they have now through their own strength, will only increase.
Again, if you’re a union member in a workplace, you don’t gain any extra influence over the bosses by resigning alone - your contact with other workers decreases, and you’re a stone out of the shoe of the bosses. The only case where that would be effective and make any sense, would be if it was a symbolic measure designed to provoked your peers to take industrial action against the cause of your resignation, and you were ultimately expecting to be reinstated on better terms.
Rjan:
muckles:
What about austerity measures in place over many in the Eurozone causing years of mass unemployment, in many cases at levels far worse than we saw under Thatcher.
Austerity was not a policy of the EU - it was a policy of strong, national powers like Germany Again, the major players in that were people like Merkel, and Wolfgang Schauble - nationally-elected German politicians, not EU politicians.
So who are the movers and shakers that have to agree EU policy, is it not the ministers of the nations that make it up? Who did Glorious Leader May have to get approval from to move to the next stage of negotiations?
We have EU representatives - it’s not an anti-democratic institution. If you think it needs more democratic accountability, then we’d need to start electing an EU government.
Rjan:
were overridden by Greece through fraud - albeit not the fraud of ordinary workers in Greece). But that’s an issue not even worth talking about, because we aren’t a member of the Euro, and even if we were, we’d be one of the stronger economies inside it.
It wasn’t just Greece that suffered from the Eurozone austerity measures.
I look further than this island and thought you would do the same, so I’m not just concerned about workers in the UK, problems faced by workers everywhere concern me, I travel across the EU and talk to many people of many nationalities, I see the derelict factories, unfinished buildings, I talk to the people who have been unemployed of many years or who have to accept jobs well below what they could do and it saddens me and it makes me angry.
I’m just as concerned about workers in other countries. But I can’t address the entire worlds problems at once in every detail - like I’ve said, the fundamental problem with the Euro currency is that the countries which use it are not under common political and financial control, and the countries that have suffered worst under their national political mismanagement (let’s not pretend Greece is a land run by socialists in the run-up to their problems), are also the economically weakest and least able to influence policies in relation to the currency (whereas the drachma would be worth buttons against the Euro by now, allowing the country more political latitude internally and more freedom to impose the costs on the domestic rich through effective capital controls and taxation, but causing grave losses to every international entity holding any drachma-denominated assets, the risk of which might have been priced-in beforehand anyway causing Greece never to have received the capital investment inflows it did receive or never being able to engage in the profitable trading which it did engage in).
Rjan:
muckles:
If Cameron had won the referendum, it would have been business as usual throughout Europe, while most people stood passively on the sidelines and Corbyn would have gone and the Labour party would have reverted to a slightly left of centre, neo liberal party
Quite possibly. But you’ve got Corbyn, against the will of all the Blairite MPs who still haunt the Labour party, so vote for him. McDonnell too. Whatever they are, they aren’t neoliberal stooges.
Corbyn was struggling in his leadership; remember the beginning of the Election the Tories thought they’d get a landslide against a lame duck Labour leader fighting agaisnt his own MP’s. What gave Corbyn his real boost? It was the Brexit vote waking up the younger voters to politics who had previously been apathetic to politics.
Indeed, but you could say the same about the economic crash itself and the resulting austerity - it woke workers up who were previously apathetic (or ignorant) to the fact they were headed for more crashes in their living standards if they keep voting for neoliberal politics (or not voting at all). And thus Corbyn became leader. Every materialisation of a crisis, wakes more people up to some remedy.
Cor, what a marathon. 
