| > I'm truly curious about it because the EU comes up with a lot of good consumer protection and worker laws and it's not obvious what motivates them to do so. This is less directly related to unions. The EU was founded as two basic principles - free movement of goods, free movement of workers. The idea was to achieve a common comercial block that could compete in the era of superpowers. What we’ve come to realize is that those basic principles end up almost building a country from the ground up: You can’t have workers from france outcompeting germans by selling lower quality meat because the French don’t have to follow German animal health standards. So, common health standards for everyone. You can’t have an Italian company outselling Spanish companies because the Spanish lose money repairing defective products and the Italians don’t have to. So common consumer laws. keep going and we’ll eventually have an army to protect our interests, etc. and we’ll become a federal country of sorts. That explains why the EU creates standards. We all have to compete under the same rules. As for why set the standard as “improving rights for everyone” rather than “lowering rights to the minimum for everyone”, it is always going to be more popular to raise the standards, rather than be an institution that takes rights away from citizens of the member nations. If the EU was seen as the big guys that force you to work and live in worse conditions it would not last long. |