Labour 'movement' finally wake up to services directive?

international | worker & community struggles and protests | other press

Tuesday December 06, 2005 14:35

by No to Nice campaigner

About time lads and lasses!

It's interesting that the SIPTU leadership and De Rossa who both were condescending to NO campaigners in recent referendum have awoken to the threat in light of the Irish Ferries rubicon. If it wasn't so sad we'd laugh and tell you we told you so.

EU Services Directive will accelerate race to the bottom

06 December 2005
Jack O'Connor

The Irish Ferries dispute provides a dramatic warning of the kind of onslaught we face on workers’ pay and conditions if the proposed EU Services Directive goes through in anything like its original form, SIPTU General President Jack O’Connor said when he opened a conference on the issue in Dublin this morning. The conference was organised by Labour MEP Proinsias de Rossa at the Parliament’s offices in Molesworth Street, Dublin.
Mr O’Connor said that the scale of the threat to employment standards is still not widely appreciated here, although “it is no exaggeration to say that it is one of the most important issues to come before the EU Institutions in the last twenty years.
“It threatens to reverse the thrust of the entire European project which was about raising the living and employment standards of all to those of the best and most socially inclusive member states when we joined the then EEC. As it stands the Directive serves the socially divisive agenda of driving down employment standards in whole sectors of the labour force in pursuit of ‘cheapness’ rather than ‘competitiveness’.”
It was “critically important that civil society rejects the ‘law of the jungle’ and asserts the principle that in one of the richest countries in the world we don’t need our infrastructure to be built, our goods transported or our services provided by paying people slave wages”.
He added that, “The proposed Directive is designed to cover a large array of services, from architects, management consultants and travel agents, to car rental companies and, more ominously, employment agencies and health care services. Its ‘country of origin’ principle would allow companies from member states with minimal labour standards to undermine those won by workers in other member states and indeed undermine companies that have hitherto provided such services by adhering to such standards.
“The Directive would also allow Irish companies to relocate operations in member states with low standards and continue to trade in the Irish market”, he said. A proposal from the European Parliament to replace the ‘country of origin’ principle with a ‘mutual recognition’ principle, obliging businesses to comply with the law in the country in which they provide the service was likely to be opposed by the Irish Government, as well as Fianna Fail and Fine Gael MEPs, going on past performance.
“Even if it was accepted and existing legislation to protect workers’ rights member states was excluded from the directive it would offer little reassurance to workers here, because most of our labour standards are determined by collective agreements.”