STUC meeting opposes treaty
WORKERS, DEC 2007 ISSUE
The campaign to oppose the imposition of what amounts to a state constitution chaining Britain to the EU continues apace, as evidenced by a fringe meeting on 13 November at this year's Scottish TUC Women's Conference in Glasgow.
It brought home the impact of the EU's pro-capitalist nature on workers' lives. The meeting, on "Why there should be a referendum on the EU Reform Treaty" was subtitled "The implications for working lives, health services and pensions".
Rozanne Foyer, a national organiser of the Unite T&G union, with her direct knowledge of women working in the public sector, spoke of the threat to collective contracts. Over the past two decades, she explained, the extensive growth in numbers working through agencies has led to unregulated exploitation – in an area which sees some of the worst cases.
At the meeting, a leading member of Dunfermline Trades Council gave a personal account of how her life had been adversely affected by her employer using EU support and legislation to cheat her out of a substantial part of her pension. Her opposition to the EU was backed up by the Chair of the Scottish Pensioners' Forum. She asked why trades unionists should tolerate retired workers having some of the worst living standards in Europe while our government is praised by the EU for its loyal adherence to EU pensions guidelines. That adherence results in pension funds being plundered.
The dangers of separatism and disintegration could be seen in the Scottish National Party administration's unwillingness to commit to calling for a referendum. The meeting saw great dangers in the increased exploitation resulting from the unregulated movement of labour.
The Chair of the Musicians' Union (Scotland), Eddie McGuire, who was also chairing the meeting, urged delegates to spread the knowledge of these dangers and to take their demands for a referendum and opposition to the treaty to the wider union movement. This would then be building on votes won this year at both the STUC and the TUC conferences.
• At the end of October Giscard D'Estaing, the drafter of the Constitution, sent an open letter to European newspapers, published in, among others, the French paper Le Monde,. He wrote: "The institutional proposals of the constitutional treaty ... are found complete in the Lisbon Treaty, only in a different order and inserted in former treaties." He suggested that the new more complicated layout was only to avoid putting the treaty to a referendum: "Above all, it is to avoid having a referendum thanks to the fact that the articles are spread out and the constitutional vocabulary has been removed."