To Take Back Control

Mick Cash, Mick Whelan, Ronnie Draper and Doug Nicholls write:

On 23 June the Labour and trade union movement have a choice.

Millions of Labour voters and trade unionist oppose the UK’s continued membership of the EU and support withdrawal.

Like them, our three unions support a Leave vote in the EU referendum because we believe the EU acts overwhelmingly in the interests of big business and against the interests of workers.

Some believe that the EU can be reformed and can still become the progressive ‘social Europe’ that Jacques Delors promised in 1988.

They are wrong.

In Austria’s recent election a candidate from a far right party came within a handful of votes of becoming president.

Political parties of the right and their anti-worker agenda dominate EU governments and therefore, the Council of Ministers which makes the EU’s laws.

So the laws that affect our lives in the UK made in Brussels are in effect being decided by representatives of the right.

The distance at which decisions are being made from the people they affect means democratic control is all but impossible and this means EU institutions are left exposed to the lobbyists of the multinational corporations and banks. 

It is also a myth that the EU has won workers’ rights and protections for workers. 

Nearly all the laws that protect employment rights, social rights, women’s rights and racial equality in Britain are UK laws which have been won by the struggles and campaigns of the British trade union and Labour movement. 

The best defence of those rights is to hold the people who make our laws to account and to vote to remove them from power which we can only do by taking control back over our democracy and leaving the EU. 

The evidence shows that the EU cannot be trusted to protect our rights. 

The EU is developing a policy framework to attack trade union rights and attack workers.

Collective bargaining, job protections and wages are already under threat – in Portugal alone the number of private sector workers covered by union contracts has shrunk from 1.9 million to just 300,000 under the EU imposed austerity programme. 

New EU rail policies aim to entrench further privatisation of services and will lead to the fragmentation of the industry. 

Social dumping promoted by the EU has decimated UK seafarers and EU directives are forcing the privatisation of public ferry services. 

The EU is finalising the massive ‘TTIP’ trade deal with the USA which aims to introduce secret Investor State Dispute Settlement courts giving multinational companies powers to challenge our government if it increases the minimum wage, resists privatisation of health services or introduces measures to protect the environment.

The EU is a threat to jobs as well as workers’ rights.

To protect the banks and the Euro, the EU Commission and the IMF has imposed austerity programmes across the Eurozone.

These programmes consistently aimed to reduce the size of government, reduce the bargaining power of labour, cut spending on pensions and healthcare and increase labour supply to hold down wages.

They have imposed privatisation which has devastated public services and they have ruthlessly driven down wages and pushed up unemployment to the point where today, eight years on from the start of the recession, in Finland, Bulgaria, Belgium, Slovakia, France and Cyprus more than 20% of young people under 25 are out of work; in Italy, Portugal and Cyprus the figure is more than 30%, in Spain it is 45% and in Greece 51%. 

This tragedy has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 with unemployment at around 10% of the EU’s working population or 23 million people out of work according to the EU’s own statistics, the equivalent of the entire populations of Belgium and the Netherlands together. 

Neoliberal policies imposed quite deliberately by the EU and the IMF have left a generation of Europe’s young men and women without work, denied union representation and without a secure future. 

The right to work is fundamental and is not protected by the EU. 

If we remain in the EU things will only get worse.

The need to protect the Eurozone will lead to a continuing shift of powers to the EU further distancing law making from democratic control.

The Five Presidents’ Report published by the EU last year seeks convergence in “labour markets, competitiveness, business environment and public administrations, as well as certain aspects of tax policy” that would then become legally binding standards with less influence for the House of Commons and the people of Britain as the power of the Eurozone grows.

This movement of power from our local communities to remote EU institutions favours the powerful who have an open door in Brussels. 

It is no surprise then to see the leaders of business work alongside David Cameron to keep Britain locked into the EU project. 

Only a few days ago, a letter from the CEO of Serco to David Cameron was leaked. 

In the letter the CEO set out his efforts to help the campaign for the UK to remain in the EU before going on to mention in the next paragraph how Serco saw benefits from further privatisation of the UK’s prisons. 

Serco are also the company that stands to benefit from EU directives forcing the privatisation of ferry services in Scotland. 

David Cameron, George Osborne, Goldman Sachs, the CBI, the Institute of Directors, multinational companies and the IMF are all actively making the case for the UK to remain part of the EU club precisely because the EU believes in a right wing, neoliberal and anti-worker agenda. 

Outside the EU we can get rid of governments that may try to erode our rights and we can campaign for greater protection and freedoms for working people. 

If we remain in the EU, our rights will continue to be eroded by people we do not elect and have no power to remove while the business elites grow in power.

That is why the right choice for working people is to vote to leave the EU on 23 June, to take back control of our laws and to protect the rights of British workers.

Mick Cash is the General Secretary of the RMT, Mick Whelan is the General Secretary of ASLEF, Ronnie Draper is the General Secretary of the BFAWU, and Doug Nicholls is the Chair of TUAEU.