EU Tax Symposium – Esther Lynch intervention

ETUC General Secretary Esther Lynch spoke at the opening plenary panel of the EU Tax Symposium on 18 March 2025.

During her opening intervention Ms Lynch said:

“To start off: the first form of distribution is through wages and very often the reason there's high wealth individuals is because of the concentration of the profits towards the top in a way that wasn't happening in the past. So it's very important to make sure workers can join a trade union and can bargain for their fair share of the profits in that first distribution, both in wages but also in the taxes on wages.

“Secondly, and I'm very disappointed that the commission has left, because I want to say please, please do not give tax breaks to companies or high wage individuals that do not have a transformation plan agreed with the workforce. Yes, we need the investment, but every euro has to work harder. It's not okay that the company succeeds, the high wealth individuals succeed, and they do so at the cost of redundancies for workers. We don't need to do that. Transformation plans should be negotiated. 

“Thirdly, there is a problem for democracy that high wealth individuals are now using their power to influence at the highest level decisions that are being made - for example on tariffs - decisions that are being made that have a real impact on democracy. And that's also the importance of the fairness distribution discussion. We need to make tax equality absolutely essential to the European debate.”

During the panel discussion, Esther Lynch spoke about the need to defend the European social model:

“It's a dangerous slippery slope for us to go on, to say: ‘well, we need this individual so much here that they shouldn't have to pay their fair share.’ That's an idea which is very anti-democratic and anti-European. In Europe, we value our social model, we value social partnership, we value doing things together, we value solidarity in member states and between member states. That's what we need to lean into in this moment: lean into the solidarity between people. And that means holding billionaires - those people who have an awful, awful lot of money - to pay a small amount of extra tax.”

Ms Lynch went on to speak about the link between fair taxation and competitiveness:

“The challenge to European competitiveness is the lack of investment in technology, in skills. That's why we're not competing, because we don't have the productivity, because we haven't developed the techniques. And why have we not done that? Because the investments haven't been made. Instead of that, all too often the profits have gone for share buybacks and for dividends. So yes, we need a European industrial policy and yes, there can be financial supports in different forms, but no more blank checks. Those supports have to come with a guarantee that there's investment: investment in the workers, and investment in a high road competitiveness on quality jobs and on doing things better, not on doing things cheaper, and not taxing companies and high wealth individuals.”

In her closing remarks, Esther Lynch said:

“One of the biggest challenges we have is believing that we can't do it or that it's technically hard. We can do it. There are ways to do it, lots of great minds are working on it and lots of proposals are on the table. The second challenge is us thinking that every single billionaire doesn't want to pay their fair share. That's certainly not true. There's a group of billionaires who are advocating for fair taxes. And even if it was true, it doesn't matter. Everybody has to pay their fair share. That's why we elect people to come to places like this to make laws to make sure that they do it.”

The recording of the session is available here.