dagmaraka wrote:but. about social justice - one wants to be fair to the workers. which workers? german, british, dutch? or also polish, hungarian, czech? who is the bad guy in this picture? i am failing to see one.
I am seeing one.
Germany and other social- or christian-democratic-governed countries have spent decades building up a social state where workers can rely on getting decent wages, not having to work exploitative hours, having proper rights, not being able to be fired at a whim.
This is not something business owners have ever been happy about; by definition they will always be looking for a way to erode these, for them costly, achievements.
An integrating internal market offers them a choice opportunity. In Berlin, they wont be able to find people who are "willing to work seven days a week, 365 days a year, round the clock," but in Poland, because of low living standards there, they can.
So they play Polish workers and German workers out against each other.
I dont blame the Poles, for whom this is a good chance of improving their lot a bit. But I do blame the gaping opportunity, that suddenly chasmed up, for employers to do this.
If German workers refuse to work for exploitative wages or on exploitative hours, and the company, instead of heeding that reality, uses the Polish escape hatch, the workers it finds in Poland basically function as the equivalent of strike breakers.
I've never blamed strike breakers themselves - usually just people trying to get by. But the effect of strike breakers on the achievement of workers rights can be serious.
You posit two things, in this context, if I read you correctly, that I think are slightly naive.
The first one is that it is simply a question of conflicting interests between German workers and Polish workers - either one will get their way more at the disadvantage of the other or vice versa, and seeing that the Polish workers are poorer, and perhaps even more likely to be unemployed than the Germans, what is social justice? Is choosing for one over the other a question of social justice?
In this take, giving the Poles their chance will benefit Polish worker rights, giving the Germans their protection will benefit theirs, and thats the end of it. What that neglects is that
neither Polish
nor German workers will in the end benefit from a race to the bottom, where companies play them out against each other to get ever more "flexible" (modern-speak for "rightless") arrangements.
Sure,
in the short term the Poles would benefit, as Wiesemann's laundry means a step up for them compared to what they have right now. But if the net result is an "evening out" that you speak of, at a Wiesemann level, then they're both fucced - both the Germans, who would lose a lot of strenuously-achieved rights, and the Poles, who can forget about ever gaining the same. In that perspective, blocking the Poles' way right now is a disadvantage for them in the short term, but may save their chance of a
proper improvement in the long term.
The second thing is the rather casual observation of the type of practice described in this article as simply the "new social reality". The self-evident need to "restructure"!
This, if I may be so flippant to observe, is of course what the Bolkestein's (and Thomas's ;-)) of this world have worked for forever: to make the casual observer perceive flexibilisation, liberalisation and implied "realism" about lower wages, longer hours and reduced rights as "just how things are, now", something we'll just have to adapt to. In this ever more established language, the labour market is not under
threat by the openings that the (economic) liberals have first created themselves; no, it's "in turmoil", a kind of natural, transitional phenomenon that just had to happen and we can only wait out, adapting ourselves to its outcome.
But that fuzzes up the fact that we have a choice, every day again, whether we actually do want to go along with this. The services directive is
not there yet. It can be stopped. And when it comes to opening one's labour market to the competition of the, in comparison, extremely low wages (etc) that Poles or Latvians understandably are still willing to work for, there too it's not necessarily a run race and a question of a new reality we just have to resign to. Even the Irish (who, after they became one of only three EU countries to open their labour market to the competition of workers from the new member states, became the subject of many a fawning portrait on how it yielded no problems, at all) now
want limits on new member state workers again.
The analysts will tell us that, well, no can do, its all decided already, you've got to be realistic about it. But that, of course, is how many of the European reforms have been pushed through so far: we never got to vote about it, we never said we wanted it, and when we found out it was going on, our government and Brussels told us, "well nothing to do about it now! We have to accept and adapt to the new reality." On that count, I can well line up with the Eurosceptics when they demand the democratic primacy back: not about us without us*.
*Sorry Balts for stealing your slogan and using it against you ... ;-)
