Europe’s captains of industry sound warning – but is anyone listening?

Date: 20/11/03

Peter Chapman reports from the UNICE Competitiveness Day conference in Brussels

EUROPE's captains of industry took a day off from steering the good ship enterprise last week to blow their horns at the bureaucrats and politicians they blame for the red tape preventing them from turning the EU into the world's most competitive economy.

The 700 executives, crammed into a conference room at the Brussels Hilton, were already sick of years of stifling rules and regulations - from the working time directive to page upon page of environmental legislation.

Last month's REACH proposals, involving the testing and re-testing of thousands of chemicals, pushed them over the edge - or more precisely, encouraged them to vent their disapproval at this one-day event organized by UNICE, the European Union's employers' confederation.

Spurred on from the podium by heavyweights such as the group's president, ex-BASF boss Jürgen Strube, the message, illustrated by a clever reference to Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians, was clear: free business from red tape now or we can forget about being the world's leading economy by 2010.

"We fear that competitiveness in Europe is slipping - that is a bad situation," said Strube, in his typically understated way.

By contrast, others were so angry that they were even heard muttering expletives. One disgruntled executive, facing a multi-million euro compliance bill he can scarcely afford, took advantage of a slow-moving lift (was it sabotage?) to give an earbashing to Erkki Liikanen, one of the commissioners responsible for the REACH proposals.

Former Shell Netherlands boss Jacques Schraven, now chairman of Dutch employers' body VNO-NCW, summed up the feelings of many when he told the conference's morning session that the reams of rules aimed at protection of workers actually make it far harder for people to find jobs.

"I am very angry about that," he barked to an approving audience.

Michael Treschow, chairman of Ericsson, weighed in with a few words on the looming threat of communist China, which he warned is racing ahead of the EU, not only in manufacturing but also in R&D.

Instead of facing up to the threat, though, Treschow claimed that EU lawmakers were thinking up ways of undermining business even further.

He decried a recent decision by MEPs on the software protection directive, suggesting that "perhaps we should not give high protection to our software, which is the high value added in Europe to help compete with the low value added in other nations".

The pièce de résistance was meant to come from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. As a business billionaire in his own right, Il Cavaliere was among his own at the conference.

After last week's suicide bomb attack in Iraq, in which 19 Italians died, it was a huge compliment for the organizers that Berlusconi insisted on speaking at the Competitiveness Day event.

The audience welcomed his attack on bureaucracy, although the speech wasn't exactly in the Martin Luther King "I have a dream" mould.

Instead, in the language of Dante, it degenerated into a 50-minute unscripted rant, covering everything from the stability and growth pact to pension reform. A lack of headsets for non-Italian speakers dampened the impact a little.

But Berlusconi clearly felt better for getting his thoughts off his chest - which is how the rest of the speakers looked after their own tirades during the day.

The business bosses, many clearly new to the Brussels scene, had a message worth hearing. However, it is not certain if anyone else was really listening to their collective protests.

Indeed, there were mutterings from the floor that few European Commission representatives, aside from Liikanen, had bothered to turn up.

One speaker suggested that there were no MEPs or officials from the Council of Ministers present either. (Italian MEP Guido Podestà approached the European Voice editor, who moderated the morning session, to prove this was not entirely correct; some shy figures wearing "consilium" passes were also spotted among the throng).

Philippe de Buck, UNICE's secretary-general, said his group hopes to make the Competitiveness Day conference a fixture in the Brussels lobbying calendar.

But before they book the conference room, perhaps next year they ought to take a leaf out of the anti-globalization campaigners' manual and turn to the streets instead.

If wrecking McDonalds is not their style, what about an umbrella-shaking march on Rond-Point Schuman, or even a hunger-striking CEO dangling from a Brussels tower crane? (Some could do with losing the weight.)

No. On second thoughts, perhaps they should go back to their own businesses and, when it comes to lobbying, stick to what they do better than anyone else.

A timely lunch with a senior minister, a commissioner or a deputy here, the odd position paper or letter to the editor of a quality newspaper there.

And even, whisper it quietly, a well- placed political donation.

You could call it sticking up for blatant self-interest. It might not be open. It might not be democratic.

And the solidarity of the mass demonstration is lost. (Business is meant to be a dog-eat-dog world anyway, just ask Mario Monti.)

But in the end, it can work wonders.

Report of the Union of Industrial and Employers' Confederations of Europe (UNICE) Competitiveness Day Conference held in Brussels on 14 November 2003.