Enrico Tortolano: EU Threatens Workers' Rights

The EU Threatens Workers’ Rights and Jobs

It’s often argued that the EU underpins our rights and that leaving Britain would leave us vulnerable to a Conservative government free to attack workers in ever more aggressive ways. These fears are not justified. It is not the EU that protects our rights; the EU is their greatest threat.

Our Rights Were Won by Trade Unions

We have rights because trade unions and the labour movement fought relentlessly for them. The struggles for improved rights in Britain were long and hard, leading to many advances here before similar protections were secured elsewhere. Our rights were not granted by a right-wing EU, but by our determination to fight and our ability to channel that action into laws through Parliament.

Democracy vs. Corporate Power

The right to vote has always posed a threat to organised capital, especially since the Second World War when economic reforms in the interests of working people began. Today, the EU has become a mechanism by which citizens are segregated and marginalised from decision-making. As EU laws drift further from democratic control, they inevitably serve the interests of large corporations and corporate finance, not working people.

Secrecy and the Corporate Lobby

The EU’s lack of transparency and complex law-making processes allow the powerful business lobby to shape its agenda. The secretive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal is a perfect example of how remote and elitist the EU really is.

ECJ Rulings Eroding Industrial Action

As a result, the EU is eroding workers’ rights across the continent. Two rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) — the Viking Line and Laval cases — created new restrictions on industrial action and required UK courts to recognise them. In short, these rulings declare that employers’ rights always trump workers’ rights.

Austerity and the Limits of National Power

The recent fiscal waterboarding of Greece by the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund brilliantly illustrated the new limits of national democratic power in the eurozone. These neoliberal policies form part of an austerity agenda intent on cutting public pensions, driving down wages, privatising public services and dismantling the benefits safety net across the EU.

Devastation of Employment

The EU has no regard for our most fundamental right — the right to work. EU reforms have devastated employment on a staggering scale:

• More than 21 million people are unemployed in the EU today.
• The average rate of unemployment among under-25s in the eurozone is 21%.
• In Spain, the youth unemployment rate is 45%; in Greece, it’s 51%.

Time to Leave the EU

There is no genuine democratic governance in the EU, only the management of austerity and repression by unelected commissioners and financiers. The treaties ensure that reform remains an illusion. That is why now is the time to leave the EU.