I just got back from a talk by Ursula Engelen-Kefer, vice-president of the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, the big German labor federation. Call me naive, but I was a little surprised by what I heard:
* German businesses are too tightly regulated--a point she illustrated with a long anecdote which could have come straight from a Reagan speechwriter about all the bureaucratic hurdles her son had to jump through to start a business selling T-shirts. This is of course bad because it discourages entrepreneurship, small businesses, etc.
* Germany has too many immigrants, who are competing with German workers for jobs and pushing down wages. Plus, German parents don't like to send their children to school with immigrants, which is understandable, since they lower standards.
* What Europe really needs now is an Alan Greenspan. Yes, she actually said this. And went on to explain that German unions were strong supporters of central bank independence.
The German colleague who'd suggested I attended this thing offered the following gloss: Yes, he said, xenophobia is widespread and deep-rooted in Germany--much more so than anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. One consequence of German unions' strength and central place in the economy is that they have no interest in alliances with "fringe elements." And most German unionists are still bedazzled by the American "jobs machine."
What I'd like to know is, what does it mean when the program of the strongest European union movement for dealing with European integration is to clone Alan Greenspan? If someone more familiar with German politics could provide some context for this (and maybe explain how it fits into the theories of Euro-hegemony some folks have been hawking) I'd be most grateful.
Josh