A Europe that will open doors to the rest of the world

Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane MP. March 8th, 2003.

Britain is part of Europe. Our future lies in making Europe work. I have been a card-carrying union member for more than three decades.

For the first half of that period, the majority of trade unions in Britain were hostile to the European Community. I remember attacks on German trade unions and their system of co-determination with representatives on the boards of big companies. That was denounced at the TUC as class collaboration. I remember the Bullock reports calling for a European model to be accepted by the TUC. It was rejected.

Today, the trade union movement understands Europe and that is a huge change that has taken place over the past 10 years. I think we all owe a vote of thanks to one man - the outgoing General Secretary of the TUC, John Monks. He is switching his salary from pounds to euros - and like the great trade union negotiator he is, he is doing so at just the right time to cash in on the rise in the euro.

John has worked tirelessly to persuade not just his colleagues in the TUC but in the wider community of the values of full-hearted membership of the European Union and of the single currency. It has been a hard task.

COMBATTING CYNICISM ABOUT EUROPE

In certain circles in London, it has been and remains fashionable to be cynical and dismissive of Europe. Euro-cynicism and disdain and condescension about the EU - talking of Europe as if Britain were not part of Europe - is more corrosive than out and out hostility to the European Union, its institutions and its currency.

John Monks must have been coated in some special covering because he has never allowed the corrosive and fashionable cynicism about Europe penetrate his thinking. We wish him well in the new work he will undertake in Brussels as General Secretary of the ETUC.

His successor, Brendan Barber, has been working closely with Jack Straw and myself on a new initiative to get the Foreign Office and the TUC and its affiliates to work more closely to support democratic worker rights and independent trade unions around the world.

Twenty years ago I was working to organise solidarity from Europe for the giant metalworkers' strikes organised by Lula around Sao Paulo. They signalled the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil. Today Lula is President of his country. I was also involved in South Africa, with Solidarity in Poland and in South Korea in working with democratic trade unions - with the active help of the TUC - in building democracy in those countries.

NEW CHALLENGES

Today trade unions face new challenges around the world. What can we do to support democratic trade unions in parts of the Islamic world? How can we help trade unionists in Colombia where they face the most terrible death threats from the terror of both the paramilitaries and the narco-terrorist organisations like the Farc and Eln?

Jack Straw has told our ambassadors that their doors must be as open to trade unions as they are to business, to universities and NGOs. In the FCO's annual human rights report there is now a section devoted to oppression of labour rights around the world. The best way to tackle globalisation is to build networks of progressive international solidarity.

But this has to be based on open trade and open minds. Two years ago I was asked in Pittsburgh to sign a petition drawn up by the US Steelworkers aimed at helping the problems they had. The first clause called for a ban on exports of steel into the USA. I told them that as MP for Rotherham I could not sign a statement saying my steelworker constituents could not export their products. So when anti-globalisation becomes protectionist and isolationist we have to say No.

There is a progressive response to globalisation but it should be based on lowering barriers to movement of goods. In France, many believe that the Common Agricultural Policy is the ultimate expression of anti-globalisation politics because of its protectionist nature.

That is the new 21st century challenge for trade unions in Europe - how to strengthen their vital duty of protecting their members' interests while not falling into the reactionary economics of protectionism and its political sister, the reactionary politics of isolationism - expressed today by the fanatics of anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism.

As far as I am concerned the trade unions in Europe are part of any notion we have of a civilised society. It was economist, the German Ludwig Erhard, who coined the term 'social market economy' to describe his vision of how Europe should develop. I believe firmly that the market exists to serve society, not the other way. But trade unionists should never forget the need for a real material base to their important work.

The biggest attack on trade union strength has come from the continuation of mass unemployment. Unemployment is Trade Union Enemy Number One. That is why the continuing mass unemployment in Germany has seen trade union numbers fall by nearly 40 per cent in the last decade. Unemployment is approaching 10 per cent in France and fewer than one in 20 in the private sector and barely one in six of employees in the public sector are dues paying trade union members in France.

EUROPEAN MODELS

It has always been a puzzle to me, after more than a decade of working with European trade unions, that we still speak in Britain of a European social model as if there was an off-the-shelf set of rules or practices common throughout Europe which could be applied to Britain. The way industrial relations, trade union rights, workplace information and communication are organised in different European countries shows such wide divergence that it impossible to talk of a single European social model.

In Germany, for example, nearly 4 million state employers are banned under the German constitution from going on strike. These include firefighters and many railway workers. Do we want that in Britain?

In France, about 70 per cent of all health service workers are in the private sector and there have been terrible strikes and disputes involving French doctors and nurses in recent years. Do we want to see our NHS replaced by this?

In Belgium, trade unions are organised along religious and party political lines with each major party having its trade union linked organisation. Do we want to see the TUC replaced with that kind of European model?

In Denmark, the trade unions are now signing 3 and even 4-year long wage agreements. Would that be acceptable to British unions?

In Sweden, every employee in an industry can only belong to one union which covers all workers in all categories.

Would that be acceptable in Britain in the car industry where different unions claim the right to represent carworkers, or in schools with the multiplicity of teacher unions, or for Aslef and the RMT, or even in the health sector. My local hospital in Rotherham has to negotiate with 12 different unions but I see no evidence of British unions adopting the northern European model of folding into one single union for each sector.

Many European countries have nominal information and consultation rights. But in France, firms like Marks and Spencer or Renault close down their operations overnight and workers complain they learn about closures from the newspapers. In Europe, the channel for information and consultation is through works councils - usually joint employee-management bodies. No German or Dutch firm has to sign a recognition agreement with a trade union in the way our law supports.

I support information and consultation laws and I wish the CBI would talk to their European counterparts to see that they can add greatly to effective partnership in the workplace.

But equally I have to say they are not a panacea for trade union power - if anything the transfer of authority to the works council within the company framework, the norm in most EU member states, has led to lesser role for the trade union as such. In Britain, we tend to think that everything is much much better on the other side of the Channel. Yet our continental brothers and sisters look at the TUC and they see increasing trade union members thanks to recognition laws. They see increasing public sector employment thanks to redistributive taxation policies. They see government ministers seeking, as we do at the FCO, to work with trade unions. They see a minimum wage and new rights for unions in the workplace.

I hope when John Monks goes to Brussels he explains that a government that wanted to talk on partnership terms with trade unions that would be a good European model to copy.

When I was asked to make this speech I was told to examine how the European scene had changed for trade unions in the last decade. I can genuinely say that if you look at the bigger European economies - Gemany, France, Italy - the focus on employment, on core worker rights, and on putting tax money into the public services has seen much better results in Britain than any other EU member state.

That will come as a disappointment to those who still think of Europe as a paradise of trade union and worker rights which Britain should copy.

We need to take a progressive message to Europe about creating jobs, using fiscal discipline to allow budgets that release money for public investment, and about the task of shaping a partnership politics in place of militant rhetoric and the view that 50,000 people demonstrating on the street is better than 50,000 new members for trade unions.

Yes, we have much to learn from Europe. And it is time that employers got real about social Europe and realise that partnership is better than hire and fire, treat'em mean, keep 'em keen management. But government and unions can also take a message to Europe that there is an alternative to mass unemployment and trade unions will never have influence let alone power until we break the shackles that hold back the job creating potentiality of our common European home.

The challenge is to find the small connecting rods that bring people together to make the kind of progress that is only possible if the politics of progress takes root. It is more a Swedish model or perhaps a variation of what one saw in the old Federal German Republic or in the Netherlands. It builds on alliances and partnership. It works with employers, not against them. It prefers a compound interest theory or politics - delivering 3 or 4 per cent added values in different sectors each year and reject the big bang theory of politics that holds a single bold stroke or decision or announcement can make the magic difference. It is a politics of education and persuasion - reason rather than passion, determination and confidence rather than blind faith or ideology. It is a new progressive politics that if we can get right -and we can only get it right with the active support and partnership or the trade unions - will over a generation transform our nation and our Europe.

Trade unions should be at the heart of that politics and as the greatest NGOs we have, as expressions of civil society rooted in democratic accountability and realities of survival in the post-national world economy the new progressive politics opens new doors for trade unions who want to be part of the future.

I know the TUC, my TUC, my country's great trade union movement will help shape that progressive politics and help shape a Europe that will become a shining example of full employment, social solidarity and open doors to the rest of the world.