Europe | Workers and wages

Our turn to eat

Trade unions are trying to find their post-austerity voice

|AMSTERDAM

ON STREET duty in Amsterdam, a 35-year-old Dutch police officer bemoans four years without a pay rise. “The economy is picking up, the rich are getting richer and yet we at the police continue to suffer,” he says. Unhappy with new terms offered by the government (a salary increase of 5% over two years along with a possible pension cut), members of the national police union plan to stop all but essential work on September 15th and besiege government offices on the 16th.

European workers are having a decidedly discontented summer. Calls for higher wages are picking up as they sense a recovery. Airport staff in Spain, dock hands in France and crèche employees and train drivers in Germany have been on strike. More are likely to follow. In Germany the number of workdays lost to industrial action has gone up from 156,000 last year to about 1m already this year.

Maarten Keune, a labour-market expert at the University of Amsterdam, detects a feeling throughout austerity-hit Europe of “being owed”. He says, “Before the downturn people were told wages had to stay low to stimulate exports, then came the crash so wages continued to stay suppressed; but now that the crisis is coming to an end there’s a feeling of: ‘It’s our turn’.”

Toothless during the financial crisis, trade unions are finding their voice again. Many are organising the first serious strikes in years. The Netherlands’ largest union has given the government a stern ultimatum this month to improve public-sector pay.

And yet unions are mostly doing as poorly as their members. In southern Europe, where unemployment remains high and wages flat at best, unions have lost influence. Torsten Müller, an analyst at the European Trade Union Institute, blames governments that have restricted collective bargaining during the lean years.

In Spain, non-members see unions as part of the problem. During the crisis they defended a status quo that favoured insiders and hampered job-creation. Spanish unions were further hit by labour-market reforms and several scandals. Two former regional heads of the General Workers Union are being investigated for allegedly skimming millions of euros from training programmes, and a provincial head of the miners’ union was forced to resign after an apparent tax dodge.

Across southern Europe, dissatisfied workers have shifted their allegiance away from unions to new left-wing political parties that tend to focus on protesting against austerity rather than pushing for pay rises.

When salaries started to increase again modestly in some places (see chart), it was rarely due to the efforts of unions. Zsolt Darvas from Bruegel, a Brussels-based think-tank, says: “It’s the economy that’s driving the rises, not the protests.” Recent data put unemployment at its lowest level since 2012. In some countries, such as Germany, skills gaps have pulled up pay. Trade unions may now be trying to piggy-back on economic growth to justify their existence after years of inactivity and falling membership.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Our turn to eat"

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