Capital mobility, labour mobility, union immobility? Trade unions facing multinationals and migration in the EU

The paper addresses the issue of East-West union co-operation in Europe, through empirical evidence from case studies of western multinationals in the Czech Republic, and a review of union activities in the UK towards Polish migrants. The former show the limits of the EWC the institution which so far has been at the vanguard of Europeanisation, but has no collective bargaining role, and does not cover the growing number of smaller MNCs. The latter point reveals how some sectors hitherto protected from international competition (especially in services) are now affected by migration, raising new challenges for trade unions. However, both, but above all the latter, also show that Europeanisation is becoming, for migrants as well as for MNC's employees, an everyday work experience that may affect everyday union practice. Introduction Globalisation and Europeanisation can be seen as two apparently similar phenomena (Hyman 2005): as in geometry, “similar” means that the size may be different, but the shape is the same. If this is the case, as it is generally assumed that globalization threatens labour (Tilly 1995, Wright 2000), Europeanisation would do the same, only to a smaller scale. Indeed, there have been similar interpretations and arguments about the difficulty for labour organization and regulations to match the new supranational boundaries of the market in Europe (e.g. Streeck 1998). Until 2004, the main dissimilarity between EU and global phenomena was the narrow degree of socio-economic differences within the EU, which could be seen as ‘rich club’ defending its welfare through both internal co-operation and exclusionary practices (external tariffs and non-tariff barriers). The EU enlargement of 2004-07 changed this by introducing an unprecedented degree of inequality, and making the EU more similar, if not to globalization as a whole (in the EU, poorer members are a minority – worldwide, they are the large majority), certainly to its main free trade region, North America: the economic gap, as well as the population ratio, between old and new EU member states is roughly similar to that between USA-Canada and Mexico within NAFTA. Simultaneously, the changeover between Prodi and Barroso at the head of the European Commission symbolized and reinforced a gradual shift towards more aggressively neoliberal orientations in the EU, with a further marginalization of the ‘social dimension’ inherited from Jacques Delors. It is therefore after the enlargement that the EU can be seriously compared to globalization as a smaller-scale process of economic integration. This is of particular interest on the case of the trade unions, given that European trade unions have historically been the strongest worldwide. In other words, in order to know if trade unions are able to face globalization, looking at how they deal with the enlarged EU is a privileged test: here, institutional processes are more visible, and trade unions have more resources. If they cannot deal with Europeanisation, a fortiori trade unions should struggle with globalization – unless we argue that the only way for trade unions to react is realize not to have anything else to lose. This paper will test the hypothesis, formulated before 2004 (Meardi 2002), that the enlargement creates new specific challenges for labour – as suggested by the metaphor of ‘Trojan Horse for the Americanisation of Europe’ -, but that labour has considerable space to face them. It will assess both the evidence on the nature of the challenges (the first part of the hypothesis), and the scope for labour responses. The organizational space for these responses is examined in the most direct effects of economic integration: the mobility of capital and the mobility of labour and services (as contrasted to the more indirect effects of mobility of goods.) Empirical examples from multinationals and from Polish immigration in the UK show that while cross-border 1 A number of sceptics (e.g. Flanagan 2006) deny that globalisation actually damages labour, first because the direct effects on inequality, employee rights or working conditions are difficult to detect and distinguish from other technological or political effects, and second because there is actually evidence of benefits outweighting costs (Gunter and van der Hoeven 2004). Still, nobody seriously argues that globalisation ‘benefits’ labour power or that it improves its relative position – so the existence of a threat, apparent in public debates and evident in the feeling of insecurity, cannot be denied. The same goes for those ‘labour optimists’ who argue that labour can successfully oppose globalisation (e.g. Munck 2002), and thereby acknowledge the existence of a threat to be opposed, and for the globalisation deniers (e.g. Hirst and Thompson 1996), who would not bother denying it if the idea of globalisation were not threatening.