deficit on the current account of the balance of payments, while output growth is a mere 1.4 percent per year and industrial production across the zone is falling sharply.
The launch of a common currency has not provided the basis for a durable upturn in the European Rather, for the euro-zone as a whole, just as for Germany, a brief period of moderate growth fuelled by exports to the rest of the world which were encouraged by the speculative boom in the USA, is now coming to an end as the boom subsides.
This is likely to intensify both strategic debates on the way forward for European integration and the attacks on the working class which accompany such debates.
On the response of workers to such attacks depends not just the future of the stability pact but also the prospect for laving the basis for future struggles against neo-liberalism in Europe over the coming period. maintain the stability of a single currency that straddled multiplicity of diverse economies across Europe.
And the Euro comes to Europe at a time when there are million unemployed the EU and 50 million people living below the poverty line, much of this a direct result of job losses caused by preparation for the Euro.
The Maastricht treaty's answer to stability was the qualification clauses for make it possible membership of the single currency, the so-called convergence criteria'. This placed a strict limit on government borrowing of 3% of GDP, along with A meeting between the representatives of the Socialist Alliance and Liaison Committee for the defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU) failed to resolve the problem that both organisations have called trade union conferences for the same day March cr The SA took a decisions at the end of last year to hold a trade union conference on that day only to find in January that the CDTÚ had a conference on the same date. The SA promptly approached the LCDTU and proposed a joint conference, even being prepared to adjust the format of the conference if that was necessary to A further meeting is to take place but a joint conference now looks extremely unlikely. The conference will be quite different in size and content, of course. The SA conference is expected to be between 700 and 1.000 people, whilst the LCDTU conference is being held in a room with a seating capacity of 80 - although it will certainiy The LCDTU is the trade union campaign of the CPB, and has been going for over 30 years. in the 1970s it played an ambiguous role as the unofficial movement with the biggest influence within the trade unions.
Its conferences were tightly controlled. generally to the exclusion of the Trotskyists. Although today it has suffered a big decline and represents only a fraction of the forces it represented in the 70s or even the 80s, a joint conference between it and the Socialist Alliance would represent a rather historic uniting of forces which could only be to the benefit of the left in the unions and the working class movement.
The Socialist Alliance should therefore continue to press for this up to and beyond March 16.