Our politicians regularly tell us that we must
work harder and longer, and for less pay, in
order to be more “competitive.” We must
reduce or give up our hard-earned social
protections, pensions and unemployment
benefits in order to be more competitive. We
must be more “flexible,” which means we must
sacrifice job security for ever more precarious
and demanding work practices—in order to be
more competitive.
Governments must observe “fiscal discipline,”
rather than stimulating economies out of
recession, because such discipline makes us
more competitive. Peripheral EU countries
must surrender their sovereignty to the Troika
in order to “regain competitiveness.” We must
sign free-trade deals, such as the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership with the
United States, because that will make us more
competitive. We must not “over-regulate” the
financial sector, or impose “excessive”
environmental restrictions on businesses,
because to do so would be to make us less
competitive.
The competitiveness dogma will not solve the
present euro-zone crisis, as it is downward
pressure on wages (and therefore consumer
demand) and on government spending that has
locked European economies into spirals of
decline.
More fundamentally, this discourse is really
about boosting corporate profits at the
expense of the welfare of the population and
of the environment. We have the option of
distributing work and income more fairly, so
that everyone has access to a decent wage and
fulfilling work, as well as high-quality public
services; but to do so requires that we
redistribute income away from financial capital
and corporate profits more generally and
towards the mass of the population, towards
public services and towards environmental
protection.
The true agenda behind this talk of
“competitiveness” will be evident at the
European Council meeting on 19 December,
which will debate a proposed new
competitiveness pact. To help draft this pact
the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel,
invited the president of France, François
Hollande, and the president of the EU
Commission, José Manuel Barroso, to a
meeting in Berlin in March with fifteen
members of the European Round Table of
Industrialists, all of them chief executive
officers of large corporations, two of whom
were asked to chair a “working group on
competitiveness.”
The report of that group called for, among
other things, reduced taxes, a rolling back of
(limited) bank regulation, further erosion of
labour protection, the streamlined facilitation
of mergers and acquisitions, and privatisation.
As Corporate Europe Observatory, put it, “the
demands of the ERT appear to amount to
nothing less than putting the European Union
entirely at the service of corporations.”
The TTIP, if adopted, would constitute another
contractual arrangement between member-
states and the Commission—a form of “troika
for all”—that would see the further weakening
of national labour laws, downward pressure on
wages, and more ERT-style “business-friendly”
regulation (or the lack of it).
This last element will increase the likelihood of
another economic crisis erupting in the future.
To avert such a crisis we need more, not less,
regulation, especially of the financial sector.
The TTIP also features yet more intrusive
mandatory rules on the economic policies of
member-states, building on the Austerity
Treaty and related measures that serve to
reduce democratic control over vital areas of
economic governance.
The pact must be rejected, for three main
reasons. Firstly, it would deepen the European
economic crisis by further depressing domestic
demand and government spending at a time
when stimulus measures are desperately
needed for recovery. Secondly, it would take
still more economic policy tools out of the
hands of national governments and transfer
them to unelected technocrats. And thirdly, in
line with the aggressive “competitiveness”
agenda long pursued, it would further degrade
the quality of life of workers by forcing them to
work longer hours for less pay in conditions of
ever greater insecurity while simultaneously
cutting the public services on which they
depend. This is being done in the name of
“competitiveness,” but in reality it is for
boosting corporate profits at the expense of
ordinary people’s rights to a decent life.
More at http://www.people.ie/news/PN-95.pdf
First published on Indymedia.ie http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104377
