IndustriAll Europe’s General Secretary Judith Kirton-Darling speaks at SIPTU’s manufacturing conference bringing solidarity and best wishes from sister unions organised within industriAll Europe.
We have a lot to do together and we count on SIPTU as an active partner in our industrial and social campaigns and work. Today I would like to talk about why your fight here to get the effective implementation of the European minimum wage directive in Ireland fits into our collective fight for industrial democracy in Europe.
Yesterday I came from Sweden to Ireland.
Workers walked out of Sweden’s Tesla garages in 27 October 2023, after years of failed attempts to get the notoriously anti-union company to the negotiating table – the struggle has become a battle to defend the Swedish labour market model based on collective agreements. On Tuesday I visited the picket line at one garage in Stockholm. Last week, Tesla summarily sacked an IG Metall works councillor after a historic campaign to organise the new production site in Brandenburg.
Irish workers know something about these aggressive union busting tactics.
In Finland, workers have been engaged in rolling sectoral strikes in response to the new right-wing government’s attempts to limit fundamental workers’ rights and cut welfare provisions. The Nordic countries were long seen as beacons for political and industrial democracy which delivered stability, competitiveness and social fairness. That image has been tarnished this year as workers from across the world have shown solidarity towards their Nordic counterparts rather than vice versa.
Following the Finnish playbook, the UK Conservative government legislated to restrict the right to strike for millions of public sector workers (thankfully now being reversed by the new Labour government).
These changes are familiar to workers in Hungary, where the right to strike has been significantly restricted by Viktor Orban’s authoritarian government, and the Czech Republic, where neoliberal austerity measures have hit workers’ rights hard.
Meanwhile in Greece, the centre-right government has bucked calls for shorter working hours and legislated to allow employers to impose a six-day working week unilaterally, sparking outrage from workers and unions.
In France, following the massive protests and strikes against Macron’s pension reform last year, union leaders found themselves pursued through the courts on punitive public order charges. In January 2024, mass mobilisation of trade unions and civil society organisations was needed to defeat a proposed Belgian law restricting the right to protest.
The latest Global Trade Union Rights Index 2024, produced by the International Trade Union Confederation, charts the increasing attacks and threats facing European workers’ rights and trade unions. These attacks have been accompanied by a rise in authoritarianism, far-right ideologies and malign corporate influence on politics.
This hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Hyper-globalisation has fuelled a historic weakening of organised labour around the world. In Europe, the post-war consensus on welfare has been undermined from within and without.
Multinational companies have been able to create extended global supply chains which have undermined the bargaining leverage of workers in every site. The resulting declines in the wage share, and falling or stagnating real wages, have allowed skyrocketing profits. Europe is leading the world in the distribution of dividends (up by 25% last year to €46bn).
Meanwhile, austerity measures have stripped welfare safety nets bare, increased precarious work and undermined labour inspectorates, with fatal work accidents increasing in nearly half of EU member states. New EU fiscal rules mean that austerity is now being enforced across Europe again – no lessons seem to have been learnt since 2010.
Austerity not only has an economic cost but political consequences. A decade on from the Great Recession, and subsequent swingeing austerity, analysis of 200 European regional elections shows a direct link between fiscal consolidation and the electoral success of political extremists.
Recent progressive wins in Europe for gig economy workers, higher minimum wages, and supply chain transparency and responsibility need to be effectively implemented. But the opponents of these advances are amassing to attack them in the name of ‘competitiveness’. We need to think creatively about how we defend them.
We are embarked on an energy and industrial revolution, while war wages in and around Europe, which is testing the strength of our economies, democratic structures and values. By every metric, the decline in respect for democratic rights at work tracks closely with the decline in economic equality and a rise in political instability. Workers’ rights are the canary in the democratic mine.
There is no “business as usual” approach. Yesterday’s failed recipes of austerity, labour-market flexibility and privatisation will only exacerbate the problems we face. The embrace of short-termism by multinational corporations – through cost-cutting, excessive dividends and share buybacks over reinvestment of profits – has further undermined our industries’ dynamism and resilience.
The rise of the far right in recent European and national election results must finally act as a wake-up call. Europe needs to urgently resolve the economic and social insecurity that lies behind growing anger and fear in our societies.
Investment and industrial democracy are antidotes to this instability.
Strong democracy at work has proven its economic worth. Countries with a high level of democracy at work have higher employment rates, better wages and income equality, higher productivity per employee and a higher share of GDP devoted to R&D. Meanwhile, companies with effective democracy at work and trade union involvement do better socially and environmentally, are more resilient to external shocks, invest more and lead on sustainability.
The European minimum wage legislation is a key means of strengthening collective bargaining – it is a shield against the attacks on collective bargaining we saw after the Great Recession in countries subject to the Troika’s actions. In Romania, its implementation has reversed the dismantling of sectoral collective bargaining, in Bulgaria union busting has been outlawed as a criminal offence. In Portugal, companies using collective agreements now benefit from tax benefits and specific policies regarding access to public or EU funding (increasing coverage by 12%). In Germany, collective bargaining conditions have been attached to public procurement.
At industriAll Europe we want to see this embedded in a wider industrial plan – a new social contract for our age, based on greater democratisation of our economy while our industries transform ecologically and digitally.
As industriAll Europe we’ve been campaigning for a European industrial policy fit for the challenges of our time, bound with social conditionalities on all public funding and procurement that ensure the maintenance and creation of good quality jobs and worker participation from plant to international levels. Negotiated deals on Just Transition and regulated fair trade, free from exploitation, are the tools. Action on the framework for strategic industries – like the pharma and chemicals industries – is vital to guarantee our strategic autonomy. This is now on the work programme of the new Commission.
The new European Commission has promised a Clean Industrial Deal within the first 100 days – as a result of our campaigning – this is an opportunity for us.
We should lock-in the strengthening of collective bargaining promoted by the European minimum wage directive through the announced upcoming reform of public procurement and state aid rules to ensure that ‘the money follows the law’. We want to see conditions around union access and collective bargaining to use public funds and contracts to leverage good industrial jobs in the private sector.
Democratic renewal is urgently needed and it must bring dividends for working people, giving them a stake in decision-making as masters of their own destiny. This is how we defend democracy at the workplace, in our societies and globally. In conjunction with our own strategic organising and building trade union power agenda, it is how we ensure stronger unions in our industries.
That is why we are determined to stand with you to get the proper implementation of the European minimum wage rules here in Ireland, as well as why we stand on the picket line with Swedes taking on Elon Musk and all other union-busters, asserting their fundamental right to a collective agreement.
Solidarity conference.