European Review Issue 42 page 4

PROPOSALS BY THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION to extend anti-discrimination laws outside the workplace have disappointed unions and pressure groups. By 2002 the EU had passed legislation outlawing most forms of discrimination at work as well as racial discrimination in a range of circumstances outside. This left the obvious gap of measures to prevent discrimination on non-racial grounds beyond the workplace. An attempt to fill this with regards to gender in the form of a directive on ‘Equal treatment in access to goods and services’ was criticised for being limited to housing, banking and insurance and leaving out altogether fields such as education which are included in the legislation on race. Now another chance seems to have been missed. Article 13 of the Amsterdam Treaty allows the EU to outlaw all forms of discrimination but the proposal is to concentrate only on disability. A Commission spokesperson confirmed that they would have liked to have gone further but cited opposition from Member States in a field where unanimity in the Council of Ministers is required. Pressure groups believe that German business has lobbied for the directive to be narrowly drawn, on the grounds of cost. ‘At the same time, we feel that social conservatives are hiding behind these arguments, as really, the directive would hardly cost anything’, commented Juris Lavrikous of the International Lesbian and Gay Association – Europe. Trade unions too were disappointed; the ETUC having argued for a broad directive covering all the grounds mentioned in Article 13 of the Treaty as both ‘better regulation’ and ‘a strong message to the Member States of the EU and their citizens that we cannot build a modern and cohesive society on discrimination’.

	Two approaches to adapting the Nokia slogan

Unions get compensation deal as Nokia quits Germany

Metalworkers fear job losses after Alcan takeover

IN JANUARY THE MOBILE TELEPHONE MANUFACTURER NOKIA announced its intention to close its factory in Bochum, Germany. This move was totally unexpected by trade unions and government. It was all the more surprising as the company had a well-established European Works Council (EWC) which was only informed on the day of the announcement. After the intial anger at the loss of up to 4,000 jobs, expressed by both handset smashing and the threat of legal proceedings, interest centered on reclaiming subsidies of €60 million which the company had received from local authorities out of a total of €100 million including those from the German government and the EU. These monies legally guaranteed the jobs at Bochum until the end of last year, two weeks before the firm made its intentions clear.
The plant is to move to Romania where labour costs are a tenth of those in Germany, according to Nokia. They offered €70 million in compensation and as a fund to help the workers find new jobs but this was increased in negotiations with unions to €200 million. Gisela Achenbach, head of the employees' works council, said the workers had ‘achieved our goal, which was to reach a satisfactory agreement for our members in line with the best German agreements’. However the question of subsidy repayment remains unsettled. The company claims that it fulfilled the terms of its deal with the region of North Rhine-Westphalia both in terms of investment and employment created but the local authority says that job totals were not high enough.
This closure and the way it was handled underlines the shortcomings of the EWC directive (see our last issue) which the EU wants to revise and has led the International Metalworkers Federation to start negotiations on a worldwide framework agreement for Nokia to secure trade union rights such as information and consultation.

EARLY THIS YEAR THE RIO TINTO GROUP, a multi-national mining and reources company, completed the takeover of rivals Alcan. Already unions, in the shape of the European Metalworkers’ Federation (EMF), have seen signs of a desire to split up the new company and sell off certain divisions to firms based outside Europe. Employees fear for the future of the 20,000 jobs in the group and even for the whole industry, based on past experience of such takeovers, involving 300,000 metalworkers.
In response the EMF organised a lobby of the European Parliament and callled on the European Commission to both meet with workers’ representatives and to alert themselves to the possible consequences. These include the threat to the packaging and engineering sectors and the possibility that manufacture of technology-intensive aluminium products will disappear and Europe will become dependent on imports. According to the EMF, the way to avoid this is to maintain investment in research and development, to set up a ‘European aluminium centre of excellence’, to institute a European energy policy which secures a stable supply at reasonable prices and to protect the packaging industry from relocation.
General Secretary Peter Scherrer demanded that ‘Europe safeguards and develops its aluminium industry and by this provides sustainable and quality employment. The packaging industry too can and does already generate thousands of jobs which are indispensable for our local food production and for maintaining a high standard of hygiene and public health’.

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