Speakers's Corner | 19/07/2008 

The European court of Justice holds an essential part of the legislative power in the European Union. In the image of the Ancien Régime sovereign courts or the Common Law HighCourts, it statutes for the future, by ruling erga omnes, like the law itself. All those who had hoped that Europe could embody on a world scale a "social model"� placing economic freedom in the service of the people awaited eagerly the two judgments it returned on the 11th and 18th of December in the Viking and Laval cases. These cases happened to raise the question of whether the trade unions have the right to act against companies using the economic freedom guaranteed by the Treaty of Rome to lower salaries and working conditions. In the Viking case, a Finnish passenger transport company wished to register one of its ferries under flag of convenience in Estonia with a view to elude Finnish labour agreements. The Laval case concerned a Latvian construction society employing a Latvian workforce in Sweden and refusing to honour Swedish labour agreements. In both instances, the trade unions had successfully resorted to a range of collective actions (sympathetic strike, blockade, boycott) to force the companies to respect those agreements. The European Court was asked to consider the specific point of whether these actions, lawful under national law, could be unlawful under Community Law in so far as they impeded the freedom of companies to place themselves under the social rules least advantageous to the workforce.

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