Slovenia hosts as 35,000 Euro-unionists march for better pay
SLOVENIA BECAME THE FIRST OF THE ‘NEW’ EU Member States to hold the EU Presidency at the beginning of the year. As usual all meetings of the Council of Ministers not scheduled for Brussels or Luxembourg are hosted by the Presidency so when the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) decided to pep up its campaign for better pay with a demonstration, Slovenia was the obvious venue.

	Timed to coincide with the meeting of EU economics ministers, the march brought together fifty trade union organisations from twenty countries.  The ETUC campaign stems from resolutions passed at its congress in Seville, Spain, last year. The plan was to go on to the offensive for more pay in general and for equality of treatment for women and men, migrant and temporary workers.  The ETUC believes that the excessive wage moderation of the last few years has not only damaged the purchasing power of workers but has led to stagnating economies and weakened job creation. It also wants to do something about limiting the salaries of top managers, some of who now earn 300 times the wages of workers in the same company.
The head of the demonstration sets off in Ljubljana		John Monks addresses the marchers in Congress Square
After a meeting with the Slovenian Prime Minister in the morning, the leaders of the ETUC delegation set off at 2 p.m. from central Ljubljana, the capital. There followed a varied and colourful procession of demonstrators from many countries including Italy, Germany, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Hungary and France as well as a strong contingent from the host federation, ZSSS of Slovenia. To the sound of chanting, sirens and whistles the 35,000 marchers covered the mile to Congress Square in about an hour and a half. The rest of the day took the form of speeches from the leaders of confederations to their attending demonstrators interspersed with DJs providing new versions of European labour movement classics such as ‘Bandiera Rossa’.

First up was ETUC General Secretary John Monks who took as his theme ‘casino capitalism’ and the fears of economic recession which its excesses had brought about. It was time that the wealthy, comfortable sections of society shared  the sacrifice and restraint that had, up until now, fallen on ‘the public sector worker, on women, on the precariously employed [and], on the low paid’. To the Council of Finance Ministers and governments and employers in general he summed up the demonstrators’ demands as ‘get your own house in order, get financial markets in order we say …. we want our rightful share of a nation’s prosperity we say ….   no more income inequality but more pay justice’. Speakers following Mr. Monks included Reiner Hoffmann and Maria Helena Andre from the ETUC, Germany, Poland, Italy and France among many other countries.