Europe offers rights to employees that are the envy of the world
Denis MacShane Friday July 2, 2004 The Guardian
Once again, we are hearing trade union tom-toms beating out a message about saying no to Europe and the EU's constitutional treaty. Nothing could be more dangerous to the future of British unions or the 300 million working-age European citizens.
Consider the facts. The EU is the only region in the world in which workers' rights are embedded as constitutional rights of citizenship. They can only be removed by Britain withdrawing from the EU, as Ukip openly proclaim and Michael Howard hints at.
The first rule of trade-union negotiations is to read the small print. The new treaty declares: "The union shall work for a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress. It shall combat social exclusion and discrimination, and shall promote social justice and protection, equality between women and men and solidarity between generations." All his ministerial life Michael Howard opposed such values. But why should British trade unions?
Written into the treaty is the obligation on the EU and member states to support the charter of social rights and "set as their objectives the promotion of employment, improved living and working conditions, proper social protection, dialogue between social partners, the development of human resources with a view to lasting high employment and the combating of exclusion".
In 1997, the Labour government signed up to the charter. Negotiations under the charter have enshrined as core rights in the workplace four weeks' paid holiday, obligatory consultation rights, pension rights for part-time workers, protection for workers in takeovers, and anti-discrimination measures, which mean gay and lesbian workers gained their first rights.
No other region in the world offers such enforceable treaty rights to its citizens in the workplace. In the US, the 16 million unionised workers have employment rights in labour-management contracts. But the 130 million non-union US workers do not enjoy the rights that EU membership confers on all UK workers.
In the debate over how to respond to globalisation, the new treaty should be held up as an example, with its insistence that workers without work or employees without rights are victims and helots of modern capitalism instead of players in a social market economy they can help shape.
It is true that no one in Brussels is seeking to tell unions or companies how to do their business inside their own countries. In Germany, nearly 4 million employees who have Beamter status as public sector workers are banned under the German constitution from going on strike. Brussels cannot tell Berlin to overturn the German constitution and laws to allow all state employees to go on strike - a right most enjoy in Britain.
Le Monde reported recently that 95% of French employees in the private sector refused to join a trade union. There is nothing in the new treaty that can make them join a union if they do not want to.
In Britain, Labour has passed law making trade union recognition mandatory where employees want it. But no German employer has formally to recognise a union on a one-to-one contractual basis, and UK laws giving such legal rights to unions would be considered unconstitutional in many EU nations.
Excessive overtime has long been a British problem. Quoting European commission statistics, Die Welt reported this week that of the 15 member states in the pre-enlargement EU, 10 had longer working weeks than the UK.
The new constitution contains no powers to stop overtime being worked. In Germany last week, Siemens came to an agreement with the IG Metall union to bring back a 40-hour week without any increase in pay.
So there is nothing in the new treaty or its charter of fundamental rights that would allow a return to secondary picketing or closed shops any more than the new treaty will overturn the strike verbot for German state employees or magic up new members for French unions. Each nation has its own version of Europe's social model.
Social Europe's biggest challenge is to reduce mass unemployment in Italy, France and Germany. Labour has been a better champion of social Europe by returning work to workers and bringing in other pro-worker legislation like union recognition rights and the minimum wage. Let Ukip and Michael Howard say no to Europe's new constitutional treaty with its powerful affirmation of social responsibility and rights. The treaty contains language for 450 million citizens that workers elsewhere in the world can only dream of. Unions should say yes to Europe.
· Denis MacShane is minister for Europe and Labour MP for Rotherham