WORKERS across Europe are linking up to confront the austerity of the Maastricht criteria: but there are those in the labour move. ment who argue for a different approach.
From me ca a core the reformist argument that the Social Chapter of Maastricht offers workers a signficant improvement in employment rights and Trade union bureaucrats who Many perspective of fighting against British that these things might achieved through the Dack door or econor and political integration. Instead of seeking crumbs Irrom the bosses table. we are now apparently paper from Brussels.
Others, Ilke the TUC (in common with the CBI) go further, and link any torovement in workers' living standards to a future expansion of be ushered in by the launch of the Euro.
Reluctant to admit their real motives, many of these bureaucrats See onion can at acto against Maastricht is somehow "na. tionalistic" or Little England" in Unfortunately for these Euromarket, spurred on by the austerity package required for most EU states to meet the Maastricht criteria, are leading to a full-scale Thatcherite offensive.
Renault workers were the first to see the flimsy protection of the Social Chapter contemptuously torn up by a management hell-bert en matching the levels of exploitation achieved under 18 years of Tory rule. German miners, too have had to resort to oid-fashioned class defend their jobs.
The spread of unemployment across europe - and the accompa nying onslaught on benefits and on welfare state provision give little comfort to those who argue that the Euro will open up a new golden age of benevolent Capitalst expan sion.
But there are those on the left, too, who stand back, arguing that Defeatist bureaucrats like Monks pin hopes on EU laws Maastricht is an irrelevance, and that the capitalist class would in any event be attacking workers throughout Europe.
The key issue, they tell us, is that during the Thatcher years the British working dass has allowed the bosses to cut real wages and cut their contributions to pensions and But the problem of such a simplistic "class struggle in each country". approach is that it ignores the concerted attack being waged ments right across Europe, each spurring the others along towards Renault: dispute over clesures has opened oyes across Europe, showing how flimsy is the "Social Chapter" workers from the NUMMI/USA