Berlin, 24/05/2006
To be checked against delivery
Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,
Mein Deutsch ist sehr gut. Mein Englisch aber ist etwas besser. Deshalb bitte ich Euch um Nachsicht, wenn ich in meiner Muttersprache zu Euch spreche.
Delegates,
Allow me to go straight forward to some key issues that are of great importance for all of us.
The first: Europe is at a cross roads. The question to be answered is: will Europe be a market economy with a weak political environment, or will it be a strong political configuration with a strong and performing market economy and a solid and stable social dimension.
To put this question on the table is not due to the typical attitude of a retrograde trade unionist. It is the question about the future architecture of our societies.
With great interest I follow the debate in Germany about the role of the state. Everywhere in the European Union, maybe with the exception of the Nordic countries, a fiction has been put on the track. The fiction that the state has to be run like a company,
That the state is inefficient by nature,
That the state is by definition a bureaucratic monster,
That every individual should take care of himself or herself.
That the policy: taxes down and profits high will provide the badly needed jobs.
This is a continuous campaign led by the one-way thinking of hard liberals taking ground more and more.
We all want a performing and efficient state organisation. But we disagree with all those who want to reduce the state to its minimum expression - what is called in German language “Nachtwaechterstaat”.
What we need is a permanent updated state organisation, to keep social cohesion, to guarantee good education without discrimination, to offer health care for all, to promote science and research, to preserve and to take care of the infrastructure, and to protect the weakest in our society.
This is what our common European culture is teaching us. And this is not at all in contradiction with a modern state management. We must campaign against the denigration of the state and work for its rehabilitation. And this has to be done in a European context.
Second: The rights of workers are at risk. I refer to what recently happened in France. Through a unilateral government decision, a law passed the National Assembly that simply abolished a key part of the labour code that protected workers against deliberate dismissals, in order to facilitate new jobs for the young. The real reasoning was to undermine the labour law because no one could believe that such a law would create new jobs. It would create bad jobs and transfer the American hire-and-fire-system to Europe.
The law, which was more a kind of unilateral decree without any preliminary consultations with the unions was finally withdrawn. The French unions - all of them and together, a good example that merits to be repeated - mobilised in an extraordinary way hundreds of thousands of citizens and built a strong coalition with the students' organisations. They won the great majority of the French public opinion and they had a strong international support from the ETUC and its member organisations, with a significant solidarity from the DGB and its members.
Three major lessons for us:
We must be united to be successful.
We need public opinion on our side.
We will never accept decisions concerning our people without social dialogue, consultation and negotiation. This is the heart of the European Social Model.
Nobody in Europe lives any more on an island called the nation-state. We are all concerned. The fight of the French unions was ours. And their success is good for all of us.
Third: The German ‘Mitbestimmung' is more and more under fire; Employers and some political forces want to get rid of it or to water it down to a strict minimum. You and me, we will remember the time when Mitbestimmung was in dispute in the European labour movement, considered by some as a kind of collaboration between ‘labour and capital'. This debate is over. Mitbestimmung is a corner stone of social and economic democracy in Germany and in Europe.
It is a specific German way and to preserve it is in our common interest.
It is a counter model to those who would like to promote only one thing: shareholder value. There is no European legal provision that endangers the Mitbestimmung in Germany.
In that respect, it is of the utmost importance to use the workers participation in the newly created European company and to create a new space of social dialogue in what is called ‘corporate governance'. Workers participation in different forms and in different traditions of social history must be preserved as one of the fundamentals of our Social Model.
This model is under pressure. Let's organise to protect and to develop it.
Fourth and last: Europe is the only region in the world that is more than just a free trade zone. It is -despite evident deficits - a positive reference in the globalisation context. Globalisation needs regulation. This can be started on regional level and in a decentralised way.
The ETUC is an alliance of trade unions, uniting all historical tendencies, acting together and respecting pluralism and diversities. This is familiar to you. We must preserve it and develop is further.
There is no national response to global problems. There is a European one and - with the founding of the new united international trade union confederation by November this year - a global one. The ETUC will contribute to this process in the best possible way.
To be able to do that, we need a strong commitment of the DGB and its member organisations - and I was delighted to see the thousands of German unionists who came to Strasbourg on March 15 to demonstrate successfully against the Bolkestein Directive.
We have your support and I thank you for that. Of course, I would not object if we could get more.
Let us work together for a united Europe, a Europe with a human face, a strong economic dimension and social progress, with a new European constitution reflecting these objectives.
That proposal has been endorsed by the German Parliament. It needs endorsement from all 25 member states. Endorsement would be a step towards a worker's Europe, and away from a business Europe, afflicted by rampant casino capitalism and Herr Münteferring's ‘locusts'. All this is the ETUC's great mission and we need the DGB at the heart of that mission.
Good luck. Glueck auf.