Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

EU strategic autonomy must mean fairer trade

Claes-Mikael Ståhl 16th December 2021

If ‘strategic autonomy’ is to define the EU’s relation to the world, linked trade deals must not mean dependence for workers.

strategic autonomy,trade,labour,workers,unions
Beware: international trade may not work for workers (Pakorn Khantiyaporn / shutterstock)

The European Union has committed itself to the policy objective of ‘open strategic autonomy’. That means boosting Europe’s ability to support and defend itself through its own resources, with less reliance on other parts of the world. The concept has important implications for the agenda not only of foreign policy, including trade, but also internally: industrial strategy, competition and so on.

Trade unions have a strong interest in shaping a new approach that will favour workers’ rights and jobs, externally and internally. We will need massive investments in research and innovation in new technologies to reduce our dependency on raw materials, for instance, and to develop a fair regulatory framework for artificial intelligence—a key driver of future growth where Europe lags behind other superpowers.

Externally, regulating global trade responsibly will be paramount, requiring long-overdue EU legislation mandating human-rights and environmental due diligence. Trade and labour are key dimensions of this approach, and trade unions must be involved in developing policies which promote fair trade, social justice, democracy and environmental sustainability.

Vulnerability of supplies

The pandemic has been a wake-up call, laying bare Europe’s vulnerability to disruption of the supply of vital goods—from face masks to semi-conductors—from elsewhere. Member states found they could not meet their own manufacturing needs nor rely on supply chains, whether within the union or involving major economies such as China and the United States. The EU has concluded that it needs to be better prepared and more self-sufficient.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

But ‘strategic autonomy’ raises many tough questions. The global economy has become increasingly complex. International trade, workers’ rights, climate change and finite vital natural resources all demand transnational solutions.

In the early 17th century, the British poet, and later priest, John Donne wrote:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less ….

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Donne’s meditation, written in the wake of his life-threatening illness, revealed a truth which has reverberated down the ages. Globally, we depend upon each other, and our seemingly separate lives are ineluctably intertwined.

Continuous struggle

All living things and social entities—from human beings to national states and advanced international organisations—live in a balance between their inner and outer conditions. Demands and needs have always to be addressed. In a world where the only constant is change, upholding a balance is a continuous struggle.

While the EU strives to be self-sustaining, as a continent and a trading bloc, it is inevitably dependent to an extent on others. Europe lives in permanent tension between the closed and the open—protectionism and free trade.

The fundamental question is: where do we accept dependency and where do we seek self-sufficiency? This question is at the core of developing strategic autonomy, and the answer is not self-evident.

Sufficient scope

When it comes to trade, the EU has naïvely embraced a ‘free market’, neoliberal agenda and failed sufficiently to support, and invest in, its own industries. It has also been too dependent on fossil energy, sometimes imported over vast distances.

August Lindberg, president of the Swedish trade union federation LO in the 1930s and 40s, used to say that keeping such a federation together required giving each member sufficient scope for egotistical behaviour. All co-operative ventures need to allow for the pursuit of some self-interest.

This notion can be helpful in the evolving debate on strategic autonomy. The trick is to define it.

EU legislation plus judgments by the European Court of Justice define ‘sufficient scope’ within member states. The exact content of EU law can change over time and is often ambiguous, although there is consensus at least on the processes involved.

But how is sufficient scope expressed in EU trade agreements? We need a more consensual trade policy that takes into account the interests of all stakeholders, not only business. This is the only way to gain public support in striving for strategic autonomy as part of Europe’s recovery programme.

More for workers

EU trade policy has to do more for workers. Strategic autonomy will not work if imposed as a top-down policy that sacrifices the welfare of working people. Trade unions must have a meaningful role, which they now lack, in developing the agenda.

How should workers’ interests be promoted in EU trade agreements? Violations of basic labour rights are insufficiently countered by dispute settlement clauses. When it comes to fighting pure trade disputes, the EU is very proactive; it needs to be equally proactive in enforcing labour rights. The labour dimension is an intrinsic part of the debate around strategic autonomy.

Many trade agreements have been beneficial for European multinationals, yet workers have lost their jobs because of relocation of production outside the EU and lack of investment in key skills. Strategic autonomy needs to protect jobs and ensure many more workers benefit from the wealth generated by trade. There have been too many losers on the workers’ side in recent years. Trade arrangements, and neoliberal globalisation more widely, have been factors in the rise of right-wing populism.

Narrative shifting

Strategic autonomy and future trade agreements need to represent a ‘win-win’ for many more workers. The European Trade Union Confederation has been at the forefront of demands for the European Commission to promote a fairer trading policy, incorporating a ‘just transition’ for workers affected by market changes.

There has been a shift in the narrative, but this has yet to be translated into action. Strategic autonomy must embrace, in a coherent way, other EU initiatives in the social and environmental arena, such as the European Pillar of Social Rights and the European Green Deal.

Europe needs to seize the opportunity of post-pandemic recovery to insist on workers’ rights, fair working conditions and social justice across the EU and in all trading partners. These objectives cannot be separated from the need to protect the global environment and counter climate change.                                                                          

The ETUC will continue to press for a strategic autonomy that benefits workers and their families around the globe.

This column is sponsored by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC).

Claes Mikael Ståhl
Claes-Mikael Ståhl

Claes-Mikael Ståhl has been deputy general secretary at the European Trade Union Confederation since September 2021. He deals with trade, mobility, employment, cohesion funds and occupational health and safety.

You are here: Home / Economy / EU strategic autonomy must mean fairer trade

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

Pakistan,flooding,floods Flooded Pakistan, symbol of climate injusticeZareen Zahid Qureshi
reality check,EU foreign policy,Russia Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: a reality check for the EUHeidi Mauer, Richard Whitman and Nicholas Wright
permanent EU investment fund,Recovery and Resilience Facility,public investment,RRF Towards a permanent EU investment fundPhilipp Heimberger and Andreas Lichtenberger
sustainability,SDGs,Finland Embedding sustainability in a government programmeJohanna Juselius
social dialogue,social partners Social dialogue must be at the heart of Europe’s futureClaes-Mikael Ståhl

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The EU recovery strategy: a blueprint for a more Social Europe or a house of cards?

This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The winter issue of the Progressive Post magazine from FEPS is out!

The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—'polycrisis', for example, even 'permacrisis'. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?

This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube