Unity! @ Unite sector conferences 2014

Unity!@UNITE November 2013

Sector Conferences

How the European Union destroys jobs

networks the big bus company bosses have enforced. Now, one council body — the Tyne & Wear Integrated Transport Authority (ITA) has resolved to consult on the possibility of introducing a Quality Contract scheme covering both commercial and secured bus services locally. Will the big boys try to get Europe on their side and stop local democratic control in the name of free trade?

Taxi drivers have been luckier in fending off European deregulation in the past — the eurocrats like their taxi rides from airports! But hints at ‘opening’ up the trade emerge annually and Brussels does nothing to help.

H Road Transport, Commercial Logistics & Retail Distribution

Unite has a proud history of representing drivers and warehouse staff. But the sector has been torn apart by the contract culture and Europe’s TUPE rules haven't been much help. Job security is poor, long hours endemic and terms and conditions are always at risk.

H Passenger Transport It has long been the policy of the union to seek a return to public ownership of the bus and tram industry. How ironic it is then that the German state owns a major British privatised transport operator, in Arriva, as does France’s RATP! We have fought to reverse the damage ever since privatisation and deregulation was forced on the sector under Thatcher but the EU has been extending to the rest of Europe that very same damage under the name of competition and would seek to prevent any restoration of public

ownership. Transport services are described as Services of General Economic Interest by the EU and therefore subject to competition rules which require them to be opened to tendering by the private sector. This was legally confirmed by the EU Court of Justice in the 2004 Altmark case. EU law now stands in the way of any attempt to take transport back into the public sector.

It took 13 years to squeeze legislation out of New Labour that could give some control at local level to councillors over the massive subsidies and chaotic

The industry is dominated by the transnationals. Despite spending decades of argument in European level councils, things get worse. European rules haven't helped — drivers’ hours rules were bad to start with and the Working Time Directive was thoroughly meddled with. This is increasingly used to make 48 hours a minimum. The Directive now specifies that much longer hours can be required for particular weeks as long the average is 48 over a four-month period (Directive 2002/15/EC).

The so-called ‘Swedish derogation’ in the Agency Workers Regulations (AWR) has been a disaster. This was supposed to give the same basic pay and conditions as standard employees. But the Swedish government sought exemptions that make a nonsense of the equal pay provision.

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H Civil Air Transport Unite is by far the biggest union within civil aviation and needs to use its weight with effect. Massive competition between airlines and airports has been artificially created by policy and this has resulted in low-cost airlines now having almost half of the traffic across the EU. Civil aviation workers of all kinds have seen their terms and conditions massively lowered.

The European Commission — the unelected arm of EU governments — has spent most of the last 25 years trying to slowly ‘liberalise’ the aviation market. This means deregulation and privatisation! The aim is a so-called ‘Single European Sky’.

By its nature the aviation industry is particularly vulnerable to airlines using ‘posted workers’, recruited in one country on lower wages and conditions and being employed in another to undermine collectively bargained conditions. In this employers have been aided by the EU Court of Justice decision in the Laval case which ruled that any industrial action to enforce local wages was a ‘restriction of the freedom of provision of services where it makes the exercise of that right less attractive’. This legal judgement has been actively used by employers in Britain.

Aviation workers of all kinds have resisted encroachments; baggage handlers, air traffic control or cabin crew workers have taken many different types of action against policies that jeopardises jobs but not profits. The latest madcap scheme from Europe is the ‘unbundling’ of support services, which threatens safety in the sky.

H Docks, Rail Ferries & Waterways

Ship owners would dearly love to see loading and unloading to become the work of seafarers and then to employ the cheapest available labour, globally. The European Union has several times tried to introduce port services legislation which would create a race to the bottom. Only a big fight by dockers across Europe has seen past ‘liberalisations’ withdrawn.

The new deep-sea container port in the Thames Estuary — the London Gateway — has refused to recognise Unite. The port’s owners, DP World, can fail to allow basic labour rights. The EU’s so-called Charter of Rights provides a right to belong to a trade union but provides no right for that union to be recognised by the employer! Moreover, a whole series of judgements by the EU’s own Court of Justice has made clear that the right to trade is a fundamental freedom over-riding all union rights and freedoms.

In Scotland the public sector ferry system has been broken up in line with EU competition regulations, infrastructure separated from operations, goods separated from passenger services and service levels reduced as private companies are introduced.

H Food, Drink & Tobacco

Many will not often think of this sector as manufacturing one but it now our largest. Unite’s members are employed by most household names. There are also hotel, catering, retail, leisure and supermarket workers.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the most controversial European Union policies. It has been controversial not only because of its huge cost but also because it is an unfair

How the European Union destroys jobs

way of protecting European agriculture from food imports from non-EU global trade. If surplus food is produced then the EU can store it, creating the EU ‘food mountains’, or even destroying it. But such exports are generally dumped on poor countries, especially in Africa.

After recent meat scandals, most people would now agree that the quality of European food supply chains leaves much to be desired. The EU has presided over a massive rise in profits and prices and deterioration in quality. Our food and drink industries have one of the lowest levels of research and development in Europe. As a result weak firms are being bought up by overseas firms and often closed once the market has been absorbed. Meat products and milk production have seen this very recently. To survive these industries require significant state investment and in some cases public ownership. Yet EU membership makes such intervention illegal under state aid rules.

H IT & Communications

Members in software development, design, desk support, servicing and IT systems development will note that European Commission’s own statement that one of its ‘principal missions’ is to promote the ‘competitiveness of the ICT industries'. This implies an escalation of the strategy of off-shoring and outsourcing. One particular focus for the EU has been to build capacity in partnership with India which produces about 300,000 computer science graduates a year.

At the same time the EU India Free Trade Agreement will include Mode 4 clauses by which firms can bring skilled IT workers from India at minimum rates of pay to work in Britain. Trade unions would be legally barred from using industrial action to secure local wages and conditions for these workers

H Rural & Agricultural

Our members in poultry, horticulture, forestry, farms,and the organic sector have been covered in well-rotted farmyard manure and spent mushroom compost for far too long! At long last, the EU recently said it was to have a major reform of its Common Agricultural Policy, which would shift us away from intensive farming to more sustainable practices. This has got nowhere fast and was always more hype than hypo-allergenic horticulture.

Over-production; the creation of ‘mountains’ and ‘lakes’ of surplus food and drink; the destruction of crops as a means of maintaining high prices — these are all unsustainable methods.

Europe’s food prices some of the highest in the world.

The diversification of the rural economy and ensuring a ready response to consumer demands for affordable, nutritous, and safe food, should not be inconsistent with high standards of animal welfare and environmental protection. Nor should unregulated wages and conditions, health and safety, and an absence of union rights be a price anyone should want to afford; not in a Socialist Britain outside of CAP. Wage levels are now far below those that have been collectively bargained due to the loss of the Wages Council and now the use of workers brought in from elsewhere under the posted workers directive.

H Metals & Foundry Workers in the steelmaking industry, foundries and castings, aluminium and precious metals will all know how massive has been the job losses in recent years.

In recent years, Spain has taken over Britain in castings production. The European Commission is currently assessing the cost basis for the steel sector, with a view to diminishing the ‘overall regulatory burden’. It is expected to adopt new initiatives that will have a major influence on the ‘competitiveness’ of the industry by the use of a system of ‘competitiveness proofing’. Undoubtedly, the drift of this review will be to lower standards in favour of exporting even more jobs to low wage economies.

H Graphical, Paper & Media

Our members in packing, papermaking, printing and distribution have all faced a great deal of technological innovation and large scale mergers in recent years. Employees have been hard hit by drastic cost-limiting policies and increased work pressure. The EU’s obsession with building a single market across the entire continent and beyond has seen massive subsidies go to East European printers for the purchase of new technology printing.

The effect has been to push prices down, especially in bulk runs such as calendars and catalogues, whilst imports of finished printed goods into the UK have risen massively.

H Chemicals, Pharma, Process & Textiles

Unite’s membership in all grades in chemicals, oil, life sciences, glass, rubber, ceramics and textiles is significant. But all these segments of industry once employed many, many more than they now do.

We have seen major restructuring, closures, relocation, new materials, and much of the sector is vulnerable to the investment whims of non-British firms. The oil refining sector in the EU is going through a crisis of over-capacity.

Ineos is an example of a company under largely foreign ownership that is trying to use the threat of closure for force cuts in wages, conditions and trade union rights. It controls a significant segment of national refining capacity. Yet long-term public ownership would be outlawed under EU competition and state-aid rules.

H Servicing & General Industries

Surprising many who thought the EU strategy to be all about privatisation, the adoption of a Services Directive shows that it is hand in glove with World Trade Organisation. Their aim is now to remove legal and administrative barriers to trade in the services sector by obliging states such as the UK to simplify procedures and formalities that service providers have to comply with.

Specifically, there is an obligation to encourage access to all service markets. Unite’s members employed in servicing and general industries are specifically in the firing line of this strategy, especially those in call centres, security and cleaning staff, building services of all kinds, home entertainment and white goods.

Previously TUPE provided some limited protection for existing workers. The Interim Judgement by the EU Court of Justice in July 2013 in the Parkwood case now allows a private contractor to derecognise the union and thereby escape responsibility for implementing collectively bargained conditions in the sector.

H Electrical, Engineering & Electronics

The sector covers members working in the production of all electrical and associated products, who will surely be interested in the Electra Report on opening European electrical engineering markets. Our union does not seem to have a view on this.

Some of Europe’s biggest employers are demanding that the EU tell India (which is seen as a priority country due to its size and potential) to open up to electrical goods sales. Perhaps it is not intended to send an invading British army but the imperial designs are all too clear. EU manufacturers also want what they think are ‘very rigid labour laws’ repealed. They mean a law that has been in existence ever since Independence, giving Indian workers decent rights. They also want to build an extended Euro-Mediterranean market, in Syria and Libya perhaps?

Followed by Egypt? All such states should be forced to harmonise their electrical standards with the EU’s, it is said.

Finally, the simplifying of the procedures for the founding of small electrical manufacturing companies (the European Private Company Statute) is proposed on the basis of creating lower ‘costs of failure for entrepreneurs’. No doubt, such firms will operate to undermine established union-organised firms.

Britain’s electrical engineering industry needs a new relationship with the emerging markets of the globe. A healthy relationship with countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China, coupled with a massive training programme of unemployed youth could place us in pole position.

H Aerospace & Shipbuilding

The Aerospace and Shipbuilding sector is involved in both civil and military aircraft design, manufacture, maintenance, repair and overhaul. It also organises workers involved in the UK space industry, shipbuilding, marine and ship repair and defence equipment manufacturing.

But it is the UK’s aerospace manufacturing sector which dominates — the second biggest in the world with 17% of the global market. Yet a skills deficit exists due to the last of training of young people in skilled apprenticeships in the past.

Britain’s shipbuilding industry now relies almost totally on defence spending in the UK – spending that will be radically cut over the next decade. The industry’s survival depends on being able to move into non-defence markets such as the very lucrative building of cruise ships and ferries. Yet this will only be feasible with state subsidies that enable the re-tooling of the industry, subsidies which are banned EU competition law In building a global agenda, A&S needs to go beyond both the narrow chasing of markets within the EU. Linking up with north America as an alternative only compounds the problem — it is our skills across the world that would be welcomed.

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H Vehicle Building & Automotive

Public services Capitalist instability means cuts

The repair, design, and manufacture of motor vehicles of all kinds is a critical part of what remains of Britain’s manufacturing economy. Despite the virtual collapse of the domestic and nationally owned volume car production, the UK sells much of South America, Russia, China, India, and South Africa. More than 75% of vehicles manufactured in the UK are exported and the proportion going to Europe has been dropping fast each year.

Now only half of our exports go to the EU — the world wants truly British cars! But much of our domestic production is owned and controlled by non-British firms, American, European, and Asian, which use our island as an assembly hub. But over a hundred low volume specialist car manufacturers operate across the UK, ranging from global brands to niche players.

Britain, along with 16 other member states, falls within the European Union’s deficit management programme, and it is therefore important to be aware that expenditure across the whole spectrum of our public services – central and local government, health, police and prisons – must be regulated to bring Britain within the Stability and Growth Pact’s limit of 60 per cent of GDP for long-term debt.

Thus Osborne’s radical cuts are designed to meet these arbitrary EU targets that have nothing to do with prudent economic management and everything to do with eroding collective bargaining across the EU in line with the ‘structural reform’ and ‘flexicurity’ targets of the EU 2020 programme.

The 20 largest specialist firms produce around 25,000 cars per year by employing 10,000 people. The best British skill is surely not in robotic assembly but in specialist design and craft production. As for components, 80% of all vehicle assembly operations could already come from UK suppliers, employing around 82,000 people.

A massively high volume of cars, previously made in Britain, are now produced in cheap labour countries. the only way to reverse this is to impose an import levy but such an act would be unlawful under EU rules.

H Motor Components

Currently, about four-fifths of all components required for vehicle assembly operations can be procured from UK suppliers and this is a significant employment base for our members. But how safe is this whilst we are in the EU? Already, we have seen a sharp downturn in the components sector and EU trade policy, which favours German manufacturers and insists on open markets, holds back the potential of what could be a thriving sector.

H Finance & Legal

The financial services sector must be reformed in a way that meets the needs of all in our society and helps the growth of the real economy. This should include stronger regulation, taxes on speculative trading, fair pay and performance systems for all, and an end to outsourcing and offshoring.

The financial crisis of 2008 provided an opportunity for the government to acquire a major sector of the industry for public ownership at a very cheap price — ensuring that banking credit could be directed into the productive economy to create real jobs and services. Instead EU state aid regulations are obliging the government to reprivatise all the banks bailed out at tax payers expense — with the jobs and conditions of ordinary bank workers being massacred along the way.

Britain’s financial services would have been even worse off if we had been in the Euro and the coalition government claims to have negotiated a UK opt-out of a new system on banking. As more and more of the countries outside the new EU banking union prepare to join the Euro, they will not stay outside the banking union for long. Decisions of the European Banking Authority and those bodies involved with insurance and financial

How the European Union destroys jobs

services are going to be more and more decisive.

Our parliament should be able to change UK-based rules on finance but it is the 27 governments and the European Parliament and the unelected Commission that have the task. The danger is that the EU would love to transfer London’s global financial business to the Euro zone, or even out of the EU altogether.

Currently, even British rights to carry out various transactions in Euros are already under challenge. Whilst the manner in which governments have mismanaged the City of London in past decades makes it virtually certain that sooner or later hostile legislation will come from the EU.

H MOD & Government Departments

Members in the Ministry of Defence, the Prisons, Royal Mint, and the Civil Service should be worried, as should all public sector employees, about their future. The contracting of provisions to the private sector has meant and will continue to mean an inevitable downwards spiral in terms and conditions.

EU policy on merging state approached to prisons rests on badly funded infrastructures and massively rising prison populations. EU free market policy rests on an acceptance of the criminalisation of wide sections of the population amidst the restructuring of economies.

H Energy & Utilities

Energy consumption in Europe has declined during the financial crisis, while coal and gas-fired power plants have also been hit by a combination of relatively high commodity prices and low electricity tariffs. Any transformation towards a low-carbon renewable energy economy would inevitably affect the utilities ability to attract capital unless labour costs are lowered and consumer prices are raised. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Japan have recently announced massive investment into or generous support mechanisms for renewable energy.

With members in every form of power generation, distribution, and retail operations, as well as the UK water industry, Unite’s members need to be clearer that some big issues are going on around their heads. Europe’s giant utilities are seeking movement by the EUs political leaders. They claim that there isn’t a sufficiently attractive ‘market environment’ for investment in new energy infrastructures. Containing the related costs whilst keeping the profits is what they mean. That would entail an

to say to ease all rules and measures that governments require when providing a service, such as environmental and health and safety regulations, to certification and licensing requirements, to apply to any sub-sector, such as education.

The degree of monetisation and marketisation we have already seen in Grovesque education would be as nothing if such ‘liberalisation’ ensues. Already in place is the EU Services Directive, which requires all EU nations to establish web portals so anyone who provides a service will have a ‘point of single contact’ where they can find out what legal requirements they would need to meet to operate in the country in question.

H Health

attack on terms and conditions across the continent.

The EU’s 2009 Third Energy Package stands directly in the way of taking the industry back into public ownership. It requires further fragmentation (such as the separation of generation, grid and supply) and unbundling to facilitate greater private ownership – steps that have already largely wrecked Britain’s energy industry.

H Community, Youth Work & Not for Profit

Youth and community service workers still within local government and those working for charities, campaigning and advice bodies, youth clubs and housing associations, have an uphill task in defending the services they provide from cuts. Winning long-term sustainable funding in the sector with quality pay, pensions, and terms and conditions is not made easier by the thrust of EU policy.

H Construction

Britain needs many more big construction projects but the free flow of labour across the borders of the 27-country bloc, despite Britain’s high unemployment, makes our construction industry much more likely to be reliant on lower cost workers.

When Poland and seven other countries joined the European Union in 2004, the scale of migration did not see the imposition of work restrictions. For many employers, the advantages of a Pan-European workforce outweigh the acute shortage of all sorts of building and construction skills our nation faces.

Places to study engineering at the country’s universities are unfilled, yet construction booms in the United States, the Middle East, Asia,and Latin America are pulling experienced engineers away from Europe.

H Education

Introducing more competition in services industries, including cross-border delivery, is actively being sought. This would lock-in privatisation as standard and weaken key regulations. If there’s any obvious lesson from another service sector — the financial industry — it’s that we need more not less oversight. Rules that could potentially have an impact on education, and other public services, whether they are explicitly included or not could well end up being introduced will nilly.

The EU officially favours ‘services domestic deregulation’. That is

Unite organises every occupational and professional group across the Health sector, including Ambulance Staff, Applied Psychologists, Arts Therapists, Blood and Transplant workers, Chaplains, Dental Professionals, Health Visitors, Sexual Health workers, Healthcare specialists, Mental Health Nurses, Nursery Nurses, Pharmacists, Physicists, Psychotherapists, School Nurses, and speech and language specialists.

Since the government has been able to build on past mistakes take the NHS to the brink of death, every single one of these needs to fear for the future, unless they hit hard and win mass support.

Billions of pounds have been wasted on so-called reorganisation of the health service in England. Whilst Trusts have been forced to make £20 billion pounds of so-called ‘efficiency saving’.

Repeated government denials about NHS privatisation don’t stand up to scrutiny. Eroding nationally negotiated pay and terms and conditions is the first step in what is clearly a plan. The World Health Organization has defined privatisation in healthcare as ‘a process in which non-governmental actors become increasingly involved in the financing and/or provision of healthcare services’ — just what is happening in Britain.

The strategy is to lay the basis for a strong Anglo-American private health sector in readiness for the establishment of a single market for healthcare in the EU. Legal judgements, including the ECJ ruling on patient mobility, have forced countries to pay for treatment in other states, the thin end of a very big wedge for introducing full-blown market mechanisms into healthcare provision.

H Local Authorities

The level and character of funds from the EU, collected from member states, that are given to local councils is currently being significantly reviewed. Up to now, the majority of such funding has gone to the more disadvantaged areas of the EU, but the role for local economic development is increasingly critical. The nature of the policy is such that most of Britain is now classed as not being disadvantaged. If such funds exist, they should be controlled by locally accountable politicians.

The extension of so-called ‘public-private’ partnerships to all things will increasingly see firms from elsewhere in the EU assume responsibility for providing refuse, leisure, housing, and other local authority requirements. H

Unity!@Unite

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The kind of union we want!

Progressive, effective and membership driven UNITE HAS rightly become regarded as peerless in taking on employers and governments in seeking a better life for its members. Whilst its leadership, in the form of the Executive Council, Deputy and General Secretary has been principled and courageous.

To stay fresh it must be flooded with democratic spirit, zealous in organising both new groups of workers and existing trades unionists.

Members expect it will be unquestionably incorruptible at all levels. Throughout, its administration and bureaucracy needs to be lean and hungry, determined to serve the needs of its membership at all times.

Unite’s size dictates the need to absolutely vigilant in maintaining union democracy. Its future can be magnificent if it attends to an increasing problem of too many structures with too little resources behind them and, it sometimes

H

seems, local enthusiasm.

The focus of authority must never rest with full-time officialdom but with the lay member executive, district and regional structures, and industrial sector frameworks.

The Communist Party’s conception of union democracy at all levels is unambiguously based upon the election of rank-and-file representatives who determine policies. Full time officials must work strictly to the needs and interests of ordinary workers — not their own politics or agenda. Many are asking if enough been done to ensure this.

Certainly, consensus needs to be not just about making a new union but about mobilising in defence of it.

But `the union’ is all too often an outside agency, something members bring in when they are desperate.

Unite needs to build a greater sense of ownership in our union.

Each county, town, and city needs stronger lay democratic mechanisms.

Not to diminish the role of our existing workplace organisations. Yet

Morning Star

How the European Union destroys jobs

the nature of employment has become fragmented and workplaces have become atomised. Local districts need their own significant funds.

The role of local officials is not simply to service the needs of the membership. Emphatically, they need to be seen as organisers in their own right. Their prime function is to build self-reliant union bodies. Local FTOs should be purveyors of Unite policy and strategy and developers of rank and file leadership.

Flattening the pyramid by boosting even more the local leadership of activists will mean a better and healthier democracy. Unite offices should be where they are needed for the members they cater for. They should be open and friendly places, in positions of easy access to members, e.g. in shopping centres and High Streets.

If you are interested in contacting Communist Party members in Unite, email: IST@communist-party.org.uk

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