4-10-08, 10:34 am

Original source: Morning Star

The European Court of Justice ruling that a Polish building subcontractor can undercut agreed industrial wage rates in Germany wasn't a surprise, given the court's previous form over last December's Viking and Laval cases.

However, it is impossible to exaggerate the potential danger and continent-wide scope of this decision.

The court has a guiding principle of making rulings that promote ever closer union in order to complete progress towards a single market within European Union borders. To this end, its main guide is the raft of directives issued by the unelected and unaccountable European Commission, which is staffed by the nominees of member-state governments.

It can take into account existing legislation in the member states, but it disregards entirely voluntary, non-statutory collective bargaining agreements that are common in many EU states, including Britain.

In refusing to accept the validity of what it sees as unreasonable additional conditions on employers, the court undermines the entire structure of employer-trade union collective bargaining.

And there can be no doubt about the effect that this will have on employer-trade union relationships. EU-based transnational corporations will be free to post workers from one EU low-wage economy - from the Baltic states, Poland or the Balkans - to higher-wage countries such as France, Germany or the Netherlands and to operate the conditions applicable in their homeland.

Given the construction bonanza that the London 2012 Olympiad offers, the implications for building and service workers in Britain are alarming.

Unless there is a reversal of this position, it won't just be Britain and it won't just be 2012.

The Luxembourg court is opening the floodgates for a tidal-wave assault on pay and conditions for all workers in Europe, especially those in the most developed states.

If employers have a choice of sticking by agreed but relatively expensive collective agreements or of setting up a subsidiary in a low-wage economy in another EU state and then importing low-paid employees, there are no prizes for guessing what would happen.

Even a minority of employers who might prefer to maintain good relations with trade unions by resisting this race to the bottom would find themselves forced by economic circumstances to fall in line.

The trade union movement has always set itself the goal of recruiting immigrant workers to minimise the capacity for employers to use them to undercut existing rates. This will be no longer possible since they will be contracted and, if they jump ship, will be replaced by their compatriots at the same poor pay and conditions.

The results of successive ECJ rulings may seem to be an aberration to some trade unionists, who still believe that the EU represents a more civilised form of capitalism - social democracy even - but they are not.

They are fully intended because the EU is not some precursor to a united socialist states of Europe. If it is the precursor to anything, it is a centralised, undemocratic European superstate where you can vote for any economic policy you like, provided that it is neoliberalism.

This latest anti-working-class ruling by the ECJ ought to prompt the labour movement to reassess the EU fairy stories and analyse the class basis of EU expansion, concentration and centralisation.

From Morning Star