KEY INSIGHTS
- Productivity without reward: Since 2000, profits in Europe’s non-financial sector have grown almost twice as fast as pay, and manufacturing value added per worker has outpaced wages by 16 percentage points.
- Labour is not the burden: Labour costs have held flat as a share of revenue for 25 years and fell in the automotive industry from 13.9 to 10.7 per cent of revenue between 2020 and 2025.
- Longer hours sell nothing: With plants running far below capacity, extra hours add no sales, and Greece’s six-day weeks and 13-hour days have brought industry no competitive edge.
- Shareholders over shop floors: EU business investment fell from 13.9 to 12.5 per cent of GDP between 2019 and 2024 while dividend payouts rose.
- Conditions on public money: Support for industry, from the Industrial Accelerator Act to the next EU budget, must guarantee quality jobs, bargaining rights, and training, with no cash for buybacks.
On 9 October, workers from across Belgium will gather in Brussels for a national day of action. Their message to the federal government is simple: stay out of our pockets. No further tampering with automatic wage indexation, which protects workers against inflation. No increase in value-added tax (VAT), which hits hardest those who have the least. And no annualisation of working time, which would let employers stretch the working week.
IndustriAll Europe stands with our Belgian trade union colleagues because the proposals being fought in Brussels today are the same ones pitched in boardrooms and finance ministries across Europe: that workers cost too much, and that competitiveness can be restored by making them cheaper, working them longer, and asking them, once again, to bear the burden of Europe’s economic crisis.
The evidence, and the experience of Europe’s industrial workers, say otherwise.
Since 2000, total gross profits in Europe’s non-financial sector have grown almost twice as fast as average pay. In manufacturing, value added per worker has outpaced pay per worker by 16 percentage points. Workers are more productive than ever. They have simply not shared in the wealth they created.
Nor are labour costs the weight that is sinking European industry. Across multiple sectors, labour costs have held flat as a share of revenue for 25 years, while in the automotive and supplier industry they fell from 13.9 per cent of revenue in 2020 to 10.7 per cent in 2025.
The case for longer hours is even weaker. Car plants, steelworks, and chemical sites across Europe are already running far below capacity. Not a single extra car, wind turbine, or kilo of cement will be sold because the workforce stays an hour longer. In countries where working time has been increased, such as Greece, which already had the longest hours in the European Union (EU) and now allows six-day weeks and 13-hour days, there is no sign that this has made industry more competitive.
We have seen this before. After the 2008-09 crisis, Europe froze wages and decentralised collective bargaining. The result was a second, self-inflicted recession, because workers could no longer afford to buy what they made. That is precisely why the wage indexation rules that Belgian trade unions are defending are exactly the kind of protection that could prevent a similar situation from happening again.
So how might Europe resolve its current economic malaise? One area that deserves more scrutiny concerns corporate governance rules, management incentives, and ownership structures. As Europe’s industry falls increasingly under the control of global asset managers and private equity funds that prioritise short-term profits and liquid returns, corporate leaders pursue strategies of shareholder value maximisation and are often rewarded for cutting rather than building. The value created on European shop floors is then paid out to shareholders who will often never set foot in the plants they own.
As a result, profits are not flowing where they should. Business investment in the EU has fallen from 13.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 to 12.5 per cent in 2024, the flip side of rising shareholder remuneration. As dividends have risen, the share of profits reinvested has fallen.
That is why the alternatives offered by the Belgian trade unions matter. Taxing share buybacks and capital income is not an attack on business. It is a reasonable request that those who have taken the largest share of the gains contribute more to our common efforts, rather than making workers, once again, foot the bill.
The same logic must guide Europe. Public support for industry, from the Industrial Accelerator Act through to the next EU budget, must come with binding social conditions: guaranteed quality jobs, collective bargaining rights, access to training, and protection against relocation, with no public money for dividends or buybacks. These conditions are all ways in which we can direct capital back into European industry and towards productive capacity, while helping to achieve crucial social and environmental goals. The Industrial Accelerator Act is another key option, as it would give European-made products preference in public procurement and public support in strategic sectors, leveraging a major source of demand to support European industry directly and retain European value chains.
Europe’s industrial workers are at a crossroads. We have every ingredient needed to thrive: a skilled workforce, the largest single market, world-class research institutions, competitive businesses, and political stability. None of it requires asking workers to pay the price for decades of underinvestment. On 9 October, Belgian workers are marching to say they are not the cost but the solution. Through industriAll Europe’s Enough is Enough campaign, workers across Europe are saying it with them.
This post is sponsored by industriAll
Source: www.socialeurope.eu
