Patronats français et allemands réclament un pacte de compétitivité européen

French and German Business Leaders seek an agreement on European competitivity

I suspect that competitivity is a word made up to describe the competitive nature of an economic unit in terms of labour costs, relative costs of inputs, costs relating to taxes and legal impediments to production and other assorted sticks that get stuck in the spokes of those wishing to make money. I have only heard (seen) it in French media, although I do seem to recall hearing competitiveness around these parts.

In France they have an organization called the Medef, whose equivalent in Germany is the BDI, a group made up of the representatives of the largest business concerns. Much of what they do is to lobby their respective governments on policy matters that affect their ability to do business in as unfettered a manner as possible.This event is like a mini-Davos, and, like Davos, they forgot to send me an invitation.

It isn’t that there aren’t political parties that clearly represent the interests of business and the people who live at that end of the economic spectrum: parties that actually represent the interests of working people are few and considered somewhat on the fringe of the political spectrum: France currently has a Socialist government that gets more of its policies from the Washington Consensus than from any serious socialist theory, a party that has gone the way of Tony Blair’s Labour Party and the Democratic Party in the US.

When these two organizations get together to discuss the competitive nature of business and government policy, we can be sure that they are less interested in competition than in ensuring that wages and benefits, environmental regulations and energy considerations are likely to be diverted to the benefit of the members of their respective organizations and will have little to do with the well-being of either of the countries in question, or of the European Union. Their idea of being competitive is paying workers on a Chinese or Bangladeshi scale, eliminating pensions and sick leave and defunding as much of the social safety net as possible. It begins to look a lot like a cartel.

If you wonder why there are so many strikes in France, in Italy, in Greece, Spain and  Portugal, this has something to do with it. François Hollande, as a candidate, was full of much of the same rhetoric as Obama the candidate. As presidents, they have turned out to be straw men for the commercial class and toxic to the interests of the greater population. The real wonder is that we don’t have more unrest here in North America.

(Original article tom Liberation.fr)