Prague, 11/06/2008

Prague, 11/06/2008 To be checked against delivery Hubertus, friends and colleagues. It is always a pleasure to come to the Congress of EMCEF and to this historic city of Prague. Prague is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the famous Prague Spring of 1968, when the flames of freedom and liberty swept through the city and the country, only to be cruelly extinguished shortly afterwards by the forces of repression.

Brussels, 09/06/2008 Rede von Reiner Hoffmann, stellvertretender Generalsekretär des Europäischen Gewerkschaftsbundes (EGB) auf der EBR-Konferenz von EGB und Hans-Böckler-Stiftung am 9. Juni 2008 in Brüssel Die Europäischen Betriebsräte sind heute ein wichtiger Bestandteil des europäischen Sozialmodells. Allerdings war es ein langer Weg, bis 1994 endlich die rechtlichen Grundlagen zur Einrichtung von Europäischen Betriebsräten (EBR) gelegt wurden.

Brussels, 09/06/2008 Our organisations have presented to successive Summits over that period our views on how to enhance the transatlantic relationship by widening it from one essentially focussed on business interests to one that takes into account the concerns of working families. The political authorities have not risen to that challenge.

Brussels, 05/06/2008

Brussels, 05/06/2008 High headline inflation is driven by factors external to the euro economy and is likely to be temporary. The strong growth performance of the euro area in the first quarter essentially comes from an exceptional surge in construction investment (mild winter) and from a surge in inventory building in Germany. With confidence falling in France and Italy, growth sharply decelerating in Spain and retail sales remaining subdued in Germany, the outlook for growth and jobs is not that good.

Brussels, 04/06/2008 The ETUC addressed a letter to the Slovenian Minister of Labour expressing its disappointment with the current set of proposals on the table. According to the ETUC, these fall short of protecting workers against the health and safety hazards of long working hours, introduce an overall diminution of protection without proper safeguards, do not in any way provide for a proper balance between flexibility and security, and will create incentives for avoiding and evading collectively agreed solutions to flexibility needs of companies.

Brussels, 03/06/2008

Brussels, 03/06/2008 The ETUC plans to draw on all its member organisations and their thousands of elected representatives in most companies in Europe to distribute its own information material on REACH, as well as the information provided by the European Commission. The ETUC is a key player in the success of REACH. It is the only organisation capable of reaching, through workers' representatives, the greatest number of companies in Europe, irrespective of their size.

Brussels, 02/06/2008 Recently, 14 European political personalities published an opinion piece in a major French daily newspaper calling for an end to “financial madness”. The German President Horst Köhler has compared the financial markets to a “monster”, and Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg was similarly outraged at the excesses of the world of finance. The ETUC welcomes all these statements, since they reflect the prescient position the ETUC developed on casino capitalism in 2007, even before the sub-prime crisis.

Brussels, 02/06/2008 "The climate package proposed by the Commission for 2020, and in particular its measures on biofuels and industrial emissions, paves the way to an externalisation of CO2 emissions outside the European Union", commented John Monks. This creates a serious problem for the credibility of the EU's commitments on climate change and sustainable development.

Brussels, 30/05/2008 The report's author, Jan Andersson, made a series of proposals that move in the right direction. MEPs of different political persuasions have stressed the need for legislators to react to the recent judgements in the European Court of Justice (ECJ): the Laval, Viking, Rüffert cases.