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First a thank you to Pat Cox and Micheál Martin: their rage and anger at Cóir’s posters has brought enormous attention to an issue we felt compelled to explain to the electorate; that the Lisbon Treaty will assist the EU in exerting downward pressure on wages – not just for those on minimum wages but for everyone.
What Cóir is saying is that the EU Courts are facilitating – even driving - a race to the bottom in terms of wages. The EU Court has found in the Ruffert, Laval and Viking judgments that the right to earn a living wage is less important than the right of big business to make a profit – even when that means exploiting workers. 
In Ruffert, the EU Court ruled on a case involving a Polish company which had brought Polish workers to Germany and paid them less than half of the German minimum wage. The EU Court found against the workers.
In 2004, the EU issued a directive called the Bolkenstein Directive which proposed the country of origin principle - allowing Latvian workers to be brought to Ireland (for example) and applying the Latvian minimum wage. This was dropped after huge controversy, but it showed the mindset of the EU Commission and the EU Court is now implementing that directive on a case by case basis.
If Lisbon is passed,Protocol 27 attached to the treaty will come into effect. This copperfastens Ruffert and the other judgments and leaves even the right to earn the minimum wage open to attack. That’s because in reality, if big business can import workers here and pay them country of origin minimum wage (which may be even lower than €1.84) Irish workers can accept those rates or see their jobs go elsewhere.
People should be very concerned: the EU Court rulings – copperfastened by Lisbon – mean that huge downward pressure will be placed on all wages.
Cóir’s poster gives the average hourly wage rate of the EU accession countries – which is a paltry €1.84. The EU is headed in a direction where migrant workers will be forced to accept such wages, also causing the wages of Irish workers to plummet.
And our own Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, is already putting the Irish minimum under scrutiny, saying at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, that if the minimum wage was shown to be an obstacle to job creation in any particular sector of the economy, then the Government would have to address the issue.
Much is made by Yes campaigners of the Charter of Rights – but it was referenced in Ruffert and Laval and the EU Court found it couldn’t protect workers because of the right to freely provide services. Furthermore Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights attached to the Lisbon Treaty states that the rights conferred by it can be limited [ie. withdrawn] to meet “objectives of general interest recognised by the Union.” In the case of workers’ right those rights are limited when the come up against “distortion of competition”.
Lobbyists for big business, like Pat Cox of Ireland for Europe, earn enormous sums and have no idea how difficult it is for ordinary workers, whose wages are now decreasing or being lost altogether. We can’t afford to see our wages fall further. We must reject this treaty.
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