18/03/2005 11:33:11 am
A Demonstration Against New Jobs and Better Living Standards. Yesterday, the Swedish blue-collar trade unions demonstrated in Stockholm against, among other things, free mobility for labour in the EU. Tomorrow, the European association of trade unions, ETUC, will demonstrate in Brussels. They will focus on opposing the proposed services directive, which aims at creating a single market for services in the EU. Why? Why should we be able to buy German cars in Sweden but not services from, say, a German architecht? Why shouldn?t Swedish IT consultants be able to offer their services in France? Of course that would mean more competition, which might be hard for companies not used to it to handle. But that is the point: competition in a large market leads to a development forward, where the old and bad disappears and the new emerges. Prices fall and quality rises. Furthermore, we have currently an outsourcing of jobs, particularly in manufacturing. Is it wise in such a situation to stop new jobs in the service sector? Already, about 70 % of europeans work with producing services, but only about 20 % of the trade consists of services. And the larger the share of the economy that comes from services is, the richer the country is and unemployment is lower. There is a great potential here - which the trade unions now try to stop from becoming reality.

Read more about the demonstration - >