What the EU has done for workers' rights in the UK...

[pampango]

What has Europe ever done for us? Well…

With the eurozone in crisis, Euroscepticism is on the rise; Tony Burke, Assistant General Secretary of Unite, lays out the many, many positives European Union membership has brought us – not least in the field of workers’ rights (that couldn’t possibly be why the mad right loath the EU, could it?!)

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/11/what-has-europe-ever-done-for-us/

It is important to recall that up until the late 1980s trade unions had been generally hostile to the EU. The TGWU and AEEU had campaigned for a no vote in the 1975 referendum on continued EU membership. 1979 saw the election of a Conservative government and with no legal employment guarantees in the UK, we in the unions learned a hard lesson: A right wing government with a big majority could dismantle the post war consensus, could deregulate the labour market, could impose unimaginable constraints on trade unions and put in place policies designed to dismantle collective bargaining.

In 1988 the President of the European Commission Jacques Delors addressed the TUC congress. He was enthusiastically received when he laid out a vision of a Europe with social and employment rights at its heart. I well recall Ron Todd, then general secretary of the TGWU, in a speech to that Congress saying that after almost 10 years of Thatcherism, the EU was “the only card game in town”.

Now, there are workers - in and outside of trade unions who take for granted the pro-worker legislation emanating from the EU - as though it has always been there. And there are those who misguidedly express anti Brussels sentiments without recognizing what they could lose.

So lets look at some of the key pieces of legislation, which have benefited working people here in the UK. They may sound complex, but workers across the UK have received some form of protection by them:

(a long list of pro-worker EU legislation)

The directives and legislation emanating from the EU has been - on the whole - beneficial to working people and trade unions.

No doubt the Tories will try to appease the anti-EU brigade with more myths about employment rights and talk of getting laws back from those pesky Europeans – supported by the media and the usual suspects among employers referring to all this as “red tape”.

Nice to see a summary of the labor benefits of EU membership.

[xchrom]

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