Snowballing EU legislation

Civitas, 2 February 2009

As the snow casts a thicker blanket over Britain than it has done in twenty years, thousands of sympathetic UK workers are joining walkouts over building jobs, which unions claim are being assigned to workers from other EU Member States… writes Lara Natale

In the highly-publicised case of power plant Total in Lincolnshire, work was subcontracted to an Italian firm, IREM, after a tender process in which five UK and two European contractors responded. IREM will be using its existing permanent Italian and Portuguese workforce for the job and Total claim no UK redundancies will be made.
Nevertheless, given the depth of the current recession -the worst in decades in an ironic parallel with the day’s snowfall- the enlisting of foreign workers, whether from the EU or further afield, for manual labour is proving seditious. The dispute is especially pertinent in light of recent forecasts that the UK will be especially badly hit by the global economic downturn. However, Gordon Brown’s memorable 2007 speech promising “British jobs for British workers” is coming back to haunt him, because his hands are tied by EU law. Freedom of movement in labour is central to the EU’s Common Market and when the UK joined in 1973, it accepted the right of other member states’ nationals to automatically live and work in Britain. So, do the protesters even have a leg to stand on?
Unions have claimed that suitably qualified unemployed UK contractors are available, but that a loophole in the EU working directives is illegally ruling out UK workers from even being considered for job vacancies. Unions therefore propose a new EU directive to overturn a ruling by the European Court of Justice in 2007 that made it easier for companies to circumvent pay deals by hiring foreigners on lower wages.
Government ministers were press-ganged into an embarrassing U-turn yesterday after Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, suggested that the Government was preparing to bow to union demands to push for measures in Europe to protect British jobs. This was firmly rebuffed, however, by Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary and ex-EU High Commissioner, who said that it would be a huge mistake. He urged workers to call off the industrial action, for “The law is not being broken and it will not be broken and I hope this message is now carried across all those workforces that have been understandably concerned.” He stressed that under EU law companies had the right to sub-contract work to those companies “best suited” for the job.
The European Union itself said it had “sympathy” with workers, but “the internal market is actually our best platform to maintain a high level of employment.”
A spokesman for the European Commission continued: “All the evidence from past crises shows that the moment you enter a spiral of closing borders to each other, at the end of the day all will be poorer and will have less employment.” In other words, promoting protectionism as a reaction to the economic problems will only further damage economies.
Ultimately, most of the strikers don’t appear fully aware of the EU working legislations. Most apparently also don’t know how much power has already moved from Westminster to Brussels: between 60 and 80% of our laws now come directly from Brussels. Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, responded to Gordon Brown’s now infamous declaration by saying: “‘British jobs for British workers’ will only happen when Britain is run by and for Britons.” Yet apathy for European politics is rife in the UK, where turnout for European elections is consistently the lowest across the European Union (just 24.0% voted in 1999 and 38.9% in 2004, both times the lowest rate of participation of any non-new member state). Are today’s strikes another example that people’s ears only prick up at mention of EU when it gets in their way? As Britain shivers in this current blizzard, the snowballing legislation from Brussels is only adding to the nation’s woes.