Speech by Sotiris Fellas Deputy Secretary General of PEO Cyprus, Member of the Central Committee of AKEL. International Meeting in Guimarães, held by PCP “Against Casual Labour and Flexicurity, for the right to work and work with rights. For a Europe of the Workers and Peoples”
July 5th 2007

Dear Comrades,

During the last few years there should be noted a very visible turning point in the policies of the European Union. This point of reference is interrelated to the policies that the EU and Member States follow with regard to flexibility in working standards and precarious work which are now dominant in EU’ strategic aims: On the one hand is the reinforcement of the Stability Pact and on the other hand is the Lisbon Strategy Review. Both were reformed in the same year, 2005. And both are being used as the main point of reference of the neoliberal offensive against public services, workers rights and their socioeconomic standards and achievements.

For example, the reviewed Stability Pact enforces Members States follow midterm policies that shall drop their public deficit by 0.5% every year even if their public deficit is bellow the 3% of the GDP benchmark that the original Stability Pact encompasses. The reviewed Stability Pact also calls member states not to spend in order to hold their public spending.
This means in practice that the state apparatus should not create new jobs, that the government should not submit increases in real wages. The main slogan of the New Stability Pact is “preservation and even more preservation”.

On the other hand side we have the Reviewed Lisbon Strategy that complements the Stability Pact. The Lisbon Strategy, is obvious for us communist parties, is the strategic implementation of extremist neoliberal policies which involves reactionary reforms both in the public and private sector. It promotes flexibility in the labor market at the expense of the working people. It calls for adaptability of the working population to the needs that the market and neoliberal globalization creates.

This socio-economic framework, the Stability Pact and Lisbon Strategy as reviewed, serves as a guideline in order for the EU to make another step towards big capital’s interests at the expense of workers and the youth. As long as this framework stays intact the general economic situation and social conditions shall worsen for the masses. It would be wrong if we as Parties of the Left did not continue to point out to the people that these structural elements along with other deteriorate the position of the worker, of the low and middle classes, cause insecurity, precarious work and extremely hard social conditions.
But at the same time we ought to stand against all those policies that implement the broader antipopulist strategy. That is why this meeting, organized by our dear friends and comrades of the PCP, was very much needed in order to coordinate our forces.

In our view the two major threats that are interrelated to the Stability Pact and Lisbon Strategy as reviewed are the Flexicurity of the Green Paper and the Bolkestein Directive.

The Green Paper, a Commission proposal about the so called “Modernization of the Labor Law” is another clear offensive against collective bargaining traditions, against the right for standard contracts. The Commission’s aim by inventing the flexicurity concept is to degrade the right for permanent and stable fulltime jobs, and to upgrade legally and politically the inhuman tendency for precarious, low quality, low paid, insecure employability. But their main goal is not to protect the right for a decent job but to create those social and legal conditions to fire employees at the minimum cost. They want workers to be adaptable to the shocks of deregulation of the market.
In order to achieve their goals they will strive to change conditions in the labour markets, work organization and labour relations, and employment and social security.

 In Cyprus where we have a tradition of industrial relations and collective bargaining this action if it prevails, would undermine living standards of the working people and the position of the worker directly, at a time when our primary goal is to extend collective bargaining and the right for organization of the worker to more sectors of the private such as retail etc.  It is ironic how easily the EU creates slogans to disorient people while at the same time continues its cynical and very dangerous approach. This is something that people can easily accept and understand if we coordinate our voices all over Europe.

Secondly, through the Bolkestein directive, the ruling classes try to subordinate social standards of one country, standards that are in a relatively higher level, to the standards of another state which are the outcome of an almost complete deregulation. It is natural, that multinational, profit seeking enterprises invest in those low social standard countries but the vague environment that the Bolkestein directive shall create from 2009 and onwards, the year that the directive shall be implemented, offers multinational capital the incentive and opportunity to claim lower social standards into the third country it will invest.

Dear comrades, it is not hard to see that we are facing a well orchestrated offensive. This offensive is coordinated by the European Commission and serves the interests of big capital at the expense of the large masses of the people.

Therefore, AKEL salutes the initiative of the PCP to call for this meeting in order to discuss about the current social situation in Europe. We believe, that if we coordinate our forces against this backlash especially at a European level and at the same time we organize the mass pressure necessary at a national level we will enlighten the working people and it will not be easy for the European Union to implement their plans at any cost. It would be easier perhaps to gain the political sympathy of the masses of people if we keep reminding them that the EU has no competence to interfere into the internal socioeconomic situation of the member states thus reinforcing our goal for a permanent withdrawal of these kind of proposals.

Thank you for your attention.