Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Wealthy states treat Eastern Europe as a colony
Amid the schisms which increasingly sunder the EU’s West from its eastern members, both sides are, for their own reasons, careful to suppress the bloc’s big economic secret: that the Old EU runs the eleven newish members in Central and Eastern (...)
In Poland and France, along with Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Greece and other Balkan countries, the scandal of household mortgages made out in Swiss francs has hit over a million victims of big grasping private banks. The Court of Justice of the European Union has just given a judgement that (...)
The Bank of Spain warns that the young are bearing the brunt of the effects of the 2008 economic crisis
The economic crisis in Spain has been punishing for young people’s pockets. Those with lower educational attainment are earning the same as their peers did at the end of the 1990s, while (...)
This article is published in cooperation with Bilten: Regional Portal.
A few weeks after the president of the Romanian Social-Democratic Party (PSD), Liviu Dragnea, was arrested on corruption charges, and once the media circus that followed subsided, Romania’s political scene seems to have (...)
On October 24, the Romanian Parliament voted a law that regulates the fiscal regime of the offshore gas exploitation in the Black Sea. It rules in favor of the gas companies that will extract the gas who will bag 56% of the profits, even after paying royalties and income taxes to the state. (...)
For years, the casual workers of the Port of Setúbal have had “regular” jobs. So “regular” that they are forced to pass a power of attorney to administrative employees of the companies who sign a contract of employment for them when needed.
Carla Ribeiro is a dockworker at the Port of Setúbal. ” I (...)
In Europe, austerity hasn’t led to economic growth. But that’s not the point — the point is to discipline workers.
There is mounting evidence that measures like restraining European workers’ wages are not effective ways of generating stable economic growth. Likewise, converting social-democratic (...)
Holland remains a preferred jurisdiction for corporatist tax evasion. Even the Dutch National Bank statistics show that the country’s “ethical” legislatíon is having no effect
The new Dutch government, installed in October last year, claims it wants to get rid of the international reputation of (...)
At the end of 2017, various NGOs are already preparing to “remember” the 10th anniversary of the fall of the large speculative investment bank Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008, after which the EU fully entered into the financial crisis and the resulting economic, social and Euro crisis. So (...)
Since the end of 2015, Portugal’s social democratic Partido Socialista (PS) has been in a minority government with parliamentary support from the radical Left – the Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda) and the Communist Party (PCP). Does this strategy of toleration of an anti-austerity government allow (...)
While demonstrations in Budapest and international reactions expressed outrage over the Hungarian Government’s attempt to shut down Central European University (CEU), on 11 April 2017, the Economic Committee of the Hungarian Parliament was also proposing legislative amendments to the Labor Code. (...)
The European Commission has ordered the computer giant Apple to pay €13 billion in back taxes to the Irish government, ruling that over and above the low rates of corporation tax Ireland levies to encourage the installation of multinationals, the “sweetheart deal” offered to Apple gave it unfair (...)
Greek workers are preparing for yet more attacks on their fundamental rights as the IMF/EU/European Central Bank ‘Troika’, at the urging of the IMF, prepares to impose a new round of cuts to minimum wages, weakening of laws protecting workers facing dismissal and further erosion of trade union (...)
A new agreement has been reached between Greece and its creditors regarding the bailout program for the country. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup, described the new deal as “ambitious” and a “major breakthrough”. However, a look at the details shows that it’s anything but. This (...)
The acute hardship European workers are facing is part of an international process of impoverishment.
Unemployment has reached unprecedented heights in Western Europe, wages are declining, and attacks on organized labor are intensifying. Nearly a quarter of Western Europe’s population, about (...)
A Greek fast-food worker on living under austerity, the difficulties of worker organizing, and the meaning of Oxi.
Last Sunday, Greeks sent a resounding “no” to the politics of austerity in a historic referendum. In the end, 61% of the country’s voters cast their ballot against the creditors’ (...)
Greece’s financial crisis is also a human one. The government is unable not only to collect taxes and manage its debt, but also to assist those whom the crisis hit hardest.
ATHENS — Finding the vein is easy. The man has clearly done it many times before, probably on this very bench. His right (...)
On Thursday, January 15, at 10.30 pm, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) decided to abandon the ceiling exchange rate of 1.20 Swiss francs for €1 that it had defended since 6 September 2011 at a cost of 300 billion francs (of which around 100 billion, it seems, were spent in the last two weeks). This (...)
Between 2003 and 2005, Gerhard Schröder’s socialist government gave German employers a helping hand in imposing sacrifices on the workers.
The paper En finir avec la compétitivité (Putting an end to competition), published jointly by ATTAC and the Copernic Foundation, sets out the measures taken (...)
In 2010 institutional investors (including banks) and hedge funds attacked Greece, the weak link in the European chain of debt, before turning their attention to Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. In so doing, they made juicy profits by forcing these countries to increase their interest-rate (...)
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