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EBS Factsheet Series - #3
ERT - Corporate Europe's Elite
The European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT) is one of the host organisations of the European Business Summit. This discreetly operating club of some 47 chairpersons and chief executive officers of Europe's largest transnational corporations has been one of the main political forces on the European scene for almost two decades. Its easy access to top politicians at both the European and national levels has been key to the Roundtable's dramatic success in shaping the European Union's political agenda. The results of the ERT's influence are unmistakable. Competitiveness has become a guiding principle for European Union (EU) policies, while the EU has turned into one of the main models of economic globalisation based on neoliberal dogma and rapid deregulation.
The ERT reaped its most remarkable successes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when its wishes for a Single Market and Trans-European Networks (TENs) of transport infrastructure were fulfilled. Roundtable fingerprints are also clearly visible on the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, which laid the groundwork for European Monetary Union. Today, the ERT continues its crusade for growth and competitiveness with the triumphant promotion of ideas like 'benchmarking' and 'innovation' as fundamental principles in EU policy making. Behind these technical-sounding concepts lies the ERT's chilling strategy to subvert all levels of society to market forces and the increasing pressures of global economic competition.
Dangerous Liaisons
The ERT has always enjoyed good connections with the European Commission. Former EC Commissioners Davignon and Ortoli were involved in the creation of the ERT and became ERT members soon after leaving office. Peter Sutherland, now chairman of investment bank Goldman Sachs was the third Commissioner to join the elite club. The very good relations and regular meetings between the Roundtable and the European Commission that were established during the decade-long presidency of Jacques Delors, were maintained under the weaker Commission of Jacques Santer. The Roundtable's access to EU decision-making structures has become increasingly institutionalised. This has happened mainly through ERT members participating in official EU advisory groups. The most noteworthy examples are the 1994 Bangemann group on telecommunications (6 ERT members in a group of 20) or the Competitiveness Advisory Group (CAG), set up on advice of the ERT and directly reporting under Commission President Santer.
Innovating Europe - Destroying Jobs
In November 1998, the ERT's working group on competitiveness, chaired by Solvay's Baron Janssen, produced a report entitled "Job Creation and Competitiveness through Innovation". In this report, the ERT urges decision-makers to stimulate and speed up the process of industrial change, and to foster innovation by providing finance, education, research and development and business-friendly regulatory conditions. "Fighting against restructuring," it says, "is simply to obstruct change and job creation." The ERT happily ignores the fact that the new jobs created on deregulated labour markets often bring worsened working conditions and lower salaries and tend to be very insecure.In the ERT's stunted worldview, policies which are in the immediate interest of the largest transnational corporations are by extension also for the common good. By presenting innovation as a means to job creation and prosperity, it tries to hide that the large ERT companies are in fact responsible for massive job losses throughout Europe. The centralisation of production and distribution catalysed by the Single Market and the Economic and Monetary Union has allowed transnational corporations to increase their profit margins by massive layoffs of workers. While paying out record amounts of dividends to their shareholders, the ERT companies seduce governments to repair the damage by speeding up the restructuring process. That is what 'innovation' boils down to.
For more examples and background, see 'Europe, Inc. - Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power' (Pluto Press 2000).
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