Frank Connolly

The EU summit on Friday 9 December, during which 26 out of 27 member countries agreed on a new intergovernmental treaty including a “fiscal compact” to enforce budgetary discipline on states which breach the 3% deficit (of GDP) limit, will not provide the growth strategy that is necessary to help deeply indebted euro zone countries out of recession.

The fiscal compact proposals will not solve the problems of the euro for the peoples of Europe but will instead “institutionalise austerity” by enforcing an annual structural deficit that does not exceed 0.5% of GDP. A strategy for growth and for a rapid job generating recovery is completely missing. Without such a strategy there is no relief in sight for the stressed countries.

Nor did this summit, dominated by German and French political and financial considerations, include any suggestion of debt restructuring, or euro bonds or any kind of fiscal transfer mechanism to direct resources from prosperous regions to those which are struggling.

The key fact resulting from this European Council is that countries which are burdened by unsustainable debt will have even less prospects of growth. This is certainly the case for Ireland where the European “fiscal compact” will greatly restrict the policy space of future Irish governments. This is perhaps the greatest threat to recovery for an economy that is reeling from the weight of the 2010 EU/ECB/IMF high interest loan facility of €63 billion and an enormous sovereign debt burden following the recapitalisation of the main banks.

Eric Lee

In November 2011, the military dictatorship in Fiji jailed two of the country’s most prominent trade union leaders. Following the launch of an online campaign sponsored by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and run on the LabourStart website, some 4,000 messages of protest were sent in less than 24 hours. The government relented, the union leaders were freed, and the campaign suspended. A month earlier, Suzuki workers locked out in India waged a successful online campaign through the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) and LabourStart. Almost 7,000 messages flooded the company’s inboxes, and after only a few days, a compromise was reached.

The spectacular success of those campaigns is the culmination of a decade-long process of building up the campaigning capacity of the international trade union movement - specifically that of the ITUC and the global union federations (like the IMF), and the role played by LabourStart in that process.

This short essay will focus on the rather narrow topic of global online labour campaigning, to see where we have been, where we are now, and to speculate where we go next.