"The unions still have a job to do, representing their members' interests to governments and parliaments. And I think collective agreements still have a role, alongside markets and laws"
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Delors is arguing for a third lane between laissez-faire nostalgia and state-only solutions: organized labor as a permanent institution of democracy, not a relic of smokestack industry. The phrasing is surgical. “Still have a job to do” concedes the obvious 1990s critique - unions had been weakened, privatization was fashionable, and “flexibility” was the decade’s hymn - while refusing to treat that weakening as moral progress. “Representing their members’ interests” is deliberately narrow, almost technocratic: he’s not romanticizing class struggle, he’s defending a mechanism for negotiating power.
The real subtext sits in the venue he names. Unions aren’t merely bargaining with bosses; they’re speaking “to governments and parliaments.” That’s Delors’ European project in miniature: policy legitimacy comes from social partners hashing out trade-offs in public, not from markets alone or top-down decrees. It’s also a warning about what happens when that channel collapses: anger migrates from bargaining tables to streets or populist ballot boxes.
His final balancing act - “alongside markets and laws” - is classic Delors: the market as an engine, law as guardrails, collective agreements as shock absorbers. He’s defending the social model that underwrote postwar stability and, later, EU integration: you can open economies and still prevent workers from being treated as disposable inputs. The line reads less like nostalgia than institutional realism: capitalism runs hotter, and messier, without organized counterweights.
The real subtext sits in the venue he names. Unions aren’t merely bargaining with bosses; they’re speaking “to governments and parliaments.” That’s Delors’ European project in miniature: policy legitimacy comes from social partners hashing out trade-offs in public, not from markets alone or top-down decrees. It’s also a warning about what happens when that channel collapses: anger migrates from bargaining tables to streets or populist ballot boxes.
His final balancing act - “alongside markets and laws” - is classic Delors: the market as an engine, law as guardrails, collective agreements as shock absorbers. He’s defending the social model that underwrote postwar stability and, later, EU integration: you can open economies and still prevent workers from being treated as disposable inputs. The line reads less like nostalgia than institutional realism: capitalism runs hotter, and messier, without organized counterweights.
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| Topic | Work |
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