The EU doesn't protect workers' rights - it has destroyed them [View all]

[AntiBank]

Freedom of movement is about bosses driving down wages, not holidays

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/eu-doesnt-protect-workers-rights-it-has-destroyed-them


A feeble and erroneous argument for supporting the EU – one which is repeatedly used by both government and opposition leaders – is that leaving the EU would damage employment in Britain. This is simply not true. A campaign by Britain in Europe entitled “Out of Europe, Out of Work” claimed that Britain would lose millions of jobs if it left the EU. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, however, described the campaign as absurd, finding that British withdrawal would have no long-term impact on employment. In the words of its Director, Dr Martin Weale, the campaign was “pure Goebbels” and “a wilful distortion of the facts”.

The European Union is about economics, neoliberal economics, monetarist market capitalism - economics that do not work. It is inherently deflationist. That is to say, it is built on constraining economic demand and driving up unemployment. It is an economics that has failed in the past, is failing again and which has rolled back the successful economic arrangements that worked so well, so brilliantly indeed, in the immediate post-war decades.

This same economics is being inflicted on Britain – cuts and austerity. Living standards have fallen, wages reduced as a proportion of total economic output (GDP) and in real terms, and inequality and poverty increasing. In the rest of the EU however, things are worse, especially in the eurozone.

The EU is not at its core about employment rights, nor even is it about human rights. The EU has accepted employment rights to give the illusion that it is on the side of workers and trade unions – at least slightly – and to try to keep trade unions passive. The millions of unemployed in Spain, Greece and increasingly elsewhere have seen no benefit from alleged worker and trade union rights. In the cases of the Viking Line and Laval, workers tried to contest their employers replacing them with lower-paid workers from another EU country. But the European Court of Justice found in favour of employers rather than workers.

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The EU and other neoliberal nightmares

Workers across Europe are rallying against a union which has used its undemocratic structures to force neoliberalism on a continent.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/enrico-tortolano/eu-and-other-neoliberal-nightmares


Voting to leave the EU is a no-brainer for the Left. The European Union is remote, racist, imperialist, anti-worker and anti-democratic: It is run by, of, and for the super-rich and their corporations. A future outside austerity and other economic blunders rests on winning the struggle to exit the EU, removing us from its neoliberal politics and institutions. Corporate bureaucrats in Brussels working as agents of the big banks and transnationals’ now exert control over every aspect of our lives. Neoliberal policies and practices dominate the European Commission, European Parliament, European Central Bank, European Court of Justice and a compliant media legitimises the whole conquest. This has left the EU constitution as the only one in the world that enshrines neoliberal economics into its text. Therefore the EU is not – and never can be – either socialist or a democracy.

Against the left’s strategic case for exit is relentless blither and blather from the elitist liberal commentariat: the EU is a social-democratic haven that protects us from the nasty Tories is their litany and verse. This is an absurd fantasy: by design the EU is a corporatist, pro-capitalist establishment. Therefore, it strains credulity that the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a rump of the trade union movement believe in the myth of Social Europe. The late Bob Crow was bang on the money when he said: “social EU legislation, which supposedly leads to better working conditions, has not saved one job and is riddled with opt-outs for employers to largely ignore any perceived benefits they may bring to workers. But it is making zero-hour contracts and agency-working the norm while undermining collective bargaining and full-time, secure employment.”

The only thing that should remain is the truth: a social Europe was never part of the European Union super-state project. How could it be? The EU has always travelled on the “free trade” train alongside “free” movement of capital, business-austerity, flexible labour markets, low pay, privatisation of public services and the eradication of welfare states. These were not just random policy proscriptions, but specifically designed by ‘free-market’ fanatics. It was the deepening and integration of the EU project that allowed unelected policy makers, driven by the powerful EU corporate lobby, to circumvent and eradicate the social rights that were won by workers in the aftermath of World-War-Two. Creating democratic deficits in all the EU institutions and policy-making by unaccountable technocrats enabled and accelerated this process of dismantling rights. This arrangement ensured the neoliberal Holy Trinity of public spending cuts, privatisation and the removal of trade union rights could be enforced with little contestation.

It’s worth noting the continuity of contempt by the European Union elites towards public opinion. Jean Monnet the founding father of the EU understood democracy was an obstacle to the elitist project and had to employ a degree of deception: "via money Europe could become political in five years" and "…the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would … the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal." Jean-Claude Juncker, today’s unelected EU chief makes clear that nothing much has changed, “when it becomes serious, you have to lie”. “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”

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Apprentice Cameron Summons ‘Master of Lies’, Darth Juncker


http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/adam-hamdy/david-cameron_b_10478742.html


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Juncker was forced to resign as Prime Minister of Luxembourg as the result of a spy scandal, which involved illegal operations conducted by SERL, the country’s intelligence service. According to the former director of SERL, at one point the service had over 300,000 active files in a country with a population of 500,000. Luxembourg’s parliamentary investigation committee found that Juncker did not treat the intelligence service seriously enough, and most of the time did not even want to know what was going on.

Among other lurid allegations, German newspapers reported that when word reached Juncker that one of his senior civil servants could be involved in serious activities in the paedophile community, Juncker tried to turn the allegations into a “joke”, asking the man concerned whether he was aware that there was a “whorehouse” in his local city that could satisfy his urges instead.

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Jean-Claude Juncker quotes:


On Sovereignty

“Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?”

On Openness

“I’m ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious...I am for secret, dark debates”

On How The EU Really Works

“We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back”

On Lying

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie”

On Democracy

“There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties”'

The final remark explains why Mr Juncker is intervening in a British referendum: he has a fundamental problem with democracy. This is the man the Austrian newspaper, Der Standard once dubbed the ‘Master of Lies’. The man who presided over the explosion of Luxembourg’s use as a tax haven by multi-national corporations. The man David Cameron once tried to block because he is too much of an EU insider who instinctively resists reform. That the Prime Minister should call upon Mr Juncker tells us everything we need to know about his belief in the outcome of this referendum.