International

In reaction to my tweets a truck driver wrote recently to inform me of a Bulgarian delivery driver working for IKEA who is paid €2.50 an hour. This morning, the radical theologian and poet Huub Oosterhuis in a speech to Christian students in Amsterdam gave another example. Portuguese men working with reinforced concrete were earning €6 an hour building the A4 motorway at Schiedam. Examples are endless: exploitation is increasing everywhere. The internal market brings ‘us’ prosperity, but workers – and not forgetting the unemployed - have seen precious little of this. Reason enough to put resistance to exploitation through regulation of the internal market at the top of the agenda at the European elections in 2014.

Major corporations make the same claim time after time: the internal market means that in the Netherlands we add on average an extra month’s pay to our annual income. There’s some truth in that, because the internal market offers economies of scale which reduce the prices of products. It is, however, not true that ‘we’ really do get that extra month’s pay. Gains come principally to international firms, not to ordinary people.

In this same internal market there are ingrained mechanisms that are putting pressure on wages and working conditions. So it is no coincidence that it is right-wing parties that are urging that labour mobility be increased within Europe. The solution to unemployment in southern Europe, according to them, is for people to simply pack their bags and go to member states where there is still work. What they’re aiming for in reality is a situation in which the labour supply throughout Europe exceeds demand. In that way wages will remain low of their own accord.

In addition, free movement of services leads to a form of unfair competition, the effects of which make victims of ever more workers. If you are employed by a firm registered in another member state, you will no longer enjoy the rights and benefits offered by the Dutch system of social security and will not fall within the state pension system. If you come from another country in which such provisions are inferior to those in the Netherlands, it will always be cheaper for a company to employ you.

Lastly, a market has been created for subcontractors operating on a European level who use a number of illegal practices. A well-known example is the subtraction of costs from the wages of workers employed in a different member state, such as payment for transport to the place of work, for housing or for food and drink. These costs often bear no relation to the true costs. Labour inspectorates work for the most part on a national basis and in many member states, moreover, including the Netherlands, these inspectorates have been subject to drastic cuts. For them there is no EU internal market, and the subcontractors take full advantage of their lack of power.

Whether you’re a driver, a building worker, or a farmworker or market garden employee or work in the hotel and catering industries, you will in an increasing number of sectors come up against unfair competition caused by the internal market. For the SP it’s clear that a fully social Europe requires social rights to come first. If the free movement of services and of labour `leads to serious exploitation, then it may be bad news for the month’s pay that big corporations derive from the internal market, but regulations are needed to stop the effects of this market from running out of control. In my view, this is therefore also an important topic for the European elections in May.