By forcing workers to membership of a particular labor union (or of one at all) The European Court of Human Rights has just ruled labor unions in violation of basic violation for half a century. Labor unions are up in arms against the ruling, and at the vile prospect of having to actually have voluntary members in their little gang of whips and chains. Woah! Great work there. Lets see if you can show your totalitarian underpinning any clearer. The Court held that there had been a violation of Article 11 (freedom of association) of the European Convention on Human Rights
Extra. Extra. Fresh off the press. Dock workers are striking all over Europe against an EU proposal they claim can press their salaries, by challenging their cushy monopoly and letting sailors take part in unloading. Highly doubtful to say the least, considering the highly optimised nature of modern shipping – there just isn’t that many hands on today’s container shipping to make much of a difference. But the EU is in dire need of a liberalisation of the ports to lower the prices and increase trade and economic activity, and not least to move some of the freight off the very polluting highways and onto the less polluting seas. A liberation which is now likely to be struck down after their protests. Dockers protest against EU directive
Breaking basic human rights, and making a strike for pollution. How’s that for a days work.
The decision came about after the EU nations decided that shipping costs needed to be cut?
That’s… opportune. How… unusual that the courts would find a human rights violation in precisely the area, creating precisely the effect, they wish to eliminate. :rolleyes:
Using the same premise, I am going to break up with my girlfriend by highlighting her pattern of vicious beatings over the past year.
Anything that gets rid of the Closed Shop is a good thing in my books. Presumably the precedent can be rolled out through all other industries, EU-wide?
Sorry to rain on your parade, Rune, but making mandatory union membership illegal won’t hurt unions as much as you hope. Case in point: in Germany union membership as a condition of employment and union non-membership as a condition of employment have been illegal for decades (at least since the beginning of the Federal Republic), and the majority of jobs are covered by collective bargaining contracts, thankyouverymuch.
I think this is a good thing because I think mandatory union membership is bad, not because I have anything against labor unions. If the unions didn’t lose a single member I’d still think it was a good thing.
So was Amnesty International, should people be forced to join against their will?
In some situations these things are answered with a “yes” by some countries. I mean, while militaries are primarily around to defend individual states, they’re also there to protect “human rights” in that they’re protecting the rights of the humans living in their respective state. And many countries do force people to join the military.
They say the verdict is of a principal nature and should set precedence.
No, sadly no. However in this instance my problem with labor unions is also more with the forced membership. The traditional labor unions with Social Democratic ties, are under pressure, because they’ve steadily been losing members the last many years – even while some new unions, without political ties, have grown. Since the verdict of the human rights court, the new unions report they have never had such phenomenal growth. So apparently there were a number of people who felt they had been unfairly forced.
Workers rights. They don’t give a damn about the rights of those outside unions. And of course it is somewhat ironic that some unions have been based on forced membership when they pretended to fight for “rights”.
Ireland is one of the richest countries of Europe - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania some of the poorest, with massive unemployment problems. One should imagine the Irish could show some largeness for those Europeans whom are not so fortunate as themselves. But apparently not. Few things give me future-shock quite like Ireland, because I remember a time, no so long ago, when Ireland was poor – the black Irish, the sick man of Europe. Back then we had Irish that would come to Denmark and Germany to look for work – mostly in construction. There were some noise then as well, about the Irish stealing the work from the Danes, working at too low wages. etc. My, how times are changing. Yet some things stay so depressingly the same. But congratulation with your new found wealth! It has been an absolutely stunning development to watch.
Rune- re-flagging vessels to avoid paying workers minimum wage is a fucking scandal. Whether the workers are Irish or not is besides the point.
Ireland has a very good minimum wage, a good standard of living, and needs to import business, especially into construction. None of us wants to stop people immigrating or working lower-paid jobs, they just want them to paid a living wage, i.e. the same minimum wage that the rest of the country (and that they, as EU citizens) are entitled to.
Well, sure, technically, but in this case, it’s like an American company who moves offshore to avoid paying US taxes and outsources jobs to avoid American labor law.
You can move your ship (or your business) wherever you want to, but to do it to avoid a particular country’s labor laws is just scummy.
So, it’d only be fair if one group (the government of Ireland) enforced a specific wage structure against the will of some of its people, but not another group (labor unions)?
You’re just removing their competitive edge, ensuring they’ll never rise out of poverty. East European and Baltic workers are on average less productive than Danish workers – I assume the same is true for Irish. If you won’t let them compete on salary, you leave them few chances. Basically you’re just freezing them out. Besides what is a (very good) minimum wage in Ireland, is most likely a very respectable salary in Latvia, on which a man can support his whole family. Money goes much further there.
It’s funny, because people who say stuff like “unions violate freedom of association” are usually the same people who say “if you don’t like the conditions, get another job.”
Irish ferries are a ferry company which carries passengers and freight between Ireland, the UK and France. Re-flagging a vessel doesn’t change that, doesn’t change the home port, doesn’t change where the vessel isberthed. It just means that EU wages don’t need to apply.
Rune- would you like to know what actually happens everyday of the week in Dublin? Many, many Eastern Europeans and people from the new Baltic EU states arrive looking for work. They might have saved a couple of hundred euro. The average monthly rent on a 1 bedroom apartment in Dublin is 850euro. A shared room in a house might be 400euro.
That means these people arrive without enough money to stay anywhere other than hostels, it means that if they don’t find work within that week then they are left homeless. It means that if they do find work that doesn’t pay minimum wage they remain homeless. It means, just to spell this out for you, that they’re homeless in a country where they don’t speak the language and can’t afford a return ticket home.
The kind of job that won’t pay minimum wage is also the kind of dodgy cash-in-hand outfit that will have on-the-job accidents (a surprisingly high % of workplace accidents occurs among Eastern Europeans employed in the construction industry) and will fire people if they miss more than a day due to illness.
You might want workers in Ireland to have the option of undercutting the minimum wage in order to provide competition, but regardless the cost of living here will continue to rise. Many of these people are sending their wages home, and the living conditions, health and so on are often of a worse standard than they would have to endure at home simply because of the cost of living here. 1euro won’t even buy you a loaf of bread from the corner shop.
No-one object to new members of the EU setting their own minimum wage that is representative of the national average, people see why companies might choose to re-locate to these countries, but immigrants working for 1euro an hour and living 15 to a room in inner city Dublin isn’t exactly the best way to kickstart the Polish economy.