20.03.1997

Renault workers show the way

For a workers' Europe!

As the deadline for European monetary union approaches, workers across the continent have begun to show that they will not meekly accept attacks on their jobs, working conditions and welfare rights.

With governments and business in every European Union country intensifying their assaults - part and parcel of the clampdown necessary to meet the Emu criteria - at last there are signs that workers are willing to coordinate their resistance across international borders.

Last week thousands of Renault workers from France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal converged on the company’s head office outside Paris to protest at Renault’s plans to close its plant at Vilvorde in Belgium and sack 3,100 workers. They were supported by thousands more French and Belgian car workers employed by other transnationals - all wanting to call a halt to the bosses’ onslaught.

In Germany militant miners descended on Bonn and forced the government into a costly retreat over its plans to decimate the country’s coal industry. Helmut Kohl’s administration originally planned to reduce its massive subsidy to coal mining by two thirds by 2005. Union leaders said that that would mean the closure of l0 out of l9 pits with the loss 50,000 jobs out of the 90,000- strong workforce.

Last week’s mass demonstration saw angry miners storm through police barricades after Kohl contemptuously announced he would not be “blackmailed” into negotiations by their presence. They pelted police and illegally occupied the parliamentary precinct, where demonstrations are banned. They mocked union leaders who called for restraint and pleaded with them to disperse.

But their militancy brought results within days. The government said that only four pits would close by 2005, but, more importantly, it has been forced to provide massive funding for early retirement, retraining and other schemes. As a result its subsidy to coal will actually increase next year.

This is of course ironic, as what lays behind this and many other such attacks throughout the EU is the desperate need to force cutbacks in order to bring down government debt. The Maastricht criteria stipulate that budgetary deficits must be no more than three percent of each country’s gross domestic product.

Germany’s record unemployment of almost 4.8 million is making its task difficult, to say the least. There is speculation that government borrowing this year will be over four percent, which means that it faces a huge task to cut this to the level required by 1999.

However, the European capitalists really have no alternative but to push ahead. If they are to compete with US and Japanese capital, it is vital that their economies move further towards integration, and monetary union is a central part of this. But weak currencies in individual member states could drag down the euro too, making it essential that government spending in each country is reduced. That is why the result of the general election will not make a scrap of difference to the ferocity of attacks faced by British workers.

German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel said: “I think we have reached the point of no return on the way to the euro. Not getting there would be a blow to Europe.” By which he means a blow to the European capitalists of course.

Clearly attacks on the working class must continue. German miners would do well to learn from the experience of their British counterparts in 1992, when a mass movement forced the Tory government to draw back from its pit closure programme, only to push it through with renewed vigour after a temporary retreat.

Also in Germany, building workers stormed the Reichstag in Berlin in a protest against unemployment and poor conditions following in the wake of ‘wage dumping’ by cheaper workers from Britain, Portugal and eastern Europe. Unfortunately, instead of calling for equal pay and better conditions for all, irrespective of nationality, they wanted the foreign workers excluded.

The Paris demonstration showed that workers from different countries can cooperate together in order to make gains for all. Fighting in opposition to each other only weakens us and strengthens the hand of our rulers. It also shows the great positive potential for the working class in the anti-Maastricht movement across Europe - if it can be united in that way.

Naive calls to ‘pull out’ of Europe simply dovetail into the reactionary chauvinist agenda and play into the hands of the state. They have nothing to do with workers’ internationalism and everything to do with the reformist chimera of ‘socialism in one country’.

It is excellent that the Socialist Labour Party has decided to sponsor the Euromarch due to rake place in May and June. Its slogan, ‘Single currency? Not at our expense’, sums up admirably the sentiment that should inspire us.

The SLP has taken an important step, but now it needs to go one further: instead of calling for retreat into British ‘socialist’ isolation, it ought to throw all its weight into the fight for European workers’ organisation capable of taking on and defeating the European bourgeoisie.

Jim Blackstock