Europe's employers are having their Marie Antoinette moment

[CHIMO]

Marie Antoinette's infamous response to the news of bread riots prior to the French Revolution, "Let them eat cake", may be apocryphal but it contains an essential truth about the unwillingness of the powerful to accept responsibility for a crisis. Neither is there any attempt to offer a solution that might involve some change to the privileges of the mighty.

Europe has seen the sharpest contraction in output since the end of the second world war. This is accounted for by an investment strike by the private sector. In the EU the fall in gross fixed capital formation (investment) was €565bn of a total loss in output of €611bn.

Yet everywhere the cry has gone up that Europe is uncompetitive and that there is only one solution to this new-found cause of the crisis: cutting wages. Employers' organisations are having their own Marie Antoinette moment and ignoring their own refusal to invest. Instead, they argue, wages must be cut and pension entitlements axed, while corporate taxes must be lowered.

Belying any notion of "austerity", which implies all sectors of society must reduce their standards of living in a common cause, the lrish employers' organisation Ibec is pressing for lower wages among some of the lowest-paid workers in sectors such as fast food and hospitality. It is attempting to override the decisions of the joint labour committees and, emboldened by the favourable response it is getting from the new Fine Gael/Labour coalition government, Ibec is now also arguing for the abolition of the JLCs altogether.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/01/europe-employers-investment-strike

[aquart]

1. Rich people are all the same.

So are useful guillotines.