EL News - What measures would you propose to counter job losses in Europe? In which sectors should we focus our efforts to create new jobs?

Pierre Eyben - Historically, the workers movement has always achieved reductions of working time in change of increases in productivity. Today, the productivity gains (which are tremendous) go back almost entirely to the capitalists. Instead, we are earring about the enlarging of the working time journey (near 65 hours weekly) and also about retiring later. This is a major social regression.

More than the continuous impoverishment of workers, the consequences of this logic are a massive structural unemployment in Europe, which the current crisis is only amplifying.  

On the contrary, we are proposing a drastic reduction of the weekly working time to 32 hours without any wage reduction, together with compensatory recruitments, to avoid penalizing workers even more.

In what regards to the creation of new employments we envisage two key sectors: public services (children nurseries, elderly care, education, transportation, post,…) and the technologies tied to ecological and sustainable development: transition of energy sources, railways, sustainable agriculture, efficient buildings and construction,….

EL News - How do you interpret the so called institutional deadlock in the EU? Is it a real problem? Could it be compared in any way to the Belgian political crisis between the regions?

Pierre Eyben - Since a political project against the people (and not for them) was developed, there would be forcibly a moment we would get stuck in the jam.

This is clearly the case in the EU, which is an institution committed to the capitalist interests. Nevertheless, the national refuge is not a solution, since in a globalized economy it is very uncertain to develop radical changes only at a national level. The challenge now is to be able to refound Europe around an emancipating and social project that in his turn pushes forward for an alternative world dynamics.

The Belgian problem is quite different. It is mainly due to the fact that the current institutions are badly adapted to deal with the economic and sociological reality in our country. We favour a stronger regional organization of the country, but remain the utmost committed above all to the solidarity among the works from North and South.

EL News - Belgium is a country with a high demographic concentration and energy dependence. Also, 55% of electricity production comes from nuclear energy. On its turn, despite official statements and concerns about the issue, the EU is investing less in all renewable energy sources taken together (which are still in need to improve their efficiency, storage and transport) than on nuclear energy research (although "nuclear energy" also includes nuclear fusion, regarded by some as a future clean and almost totally safe energy). Do you think that renewable energy sources are enough to achieve a reasonable level of energy autonomy in Europe?

Pierre Eyben - The first priority is clearly working around the “négawatt”, which means we have to diminish our consumption; without it, any solution will not be feasible.

The Communist Party (Wallonia/Brussels) is clearly in favour of abandoning the nuclear energy and for a quick transition towards the renewable energies. We are not against the nuclear for ideological reasons but for rational ones. The nuclear energy uses a limited resource (in what regards to fission) and the problems with nuclear waste remains unsolved, in spite of 50 years of research.

Therefore, we defend a combination of diverse sources of energy, together with an important consumption’s reduction.

There are of course technological challenges (which in any case would be more quickly solved if research financing was massively reoriented towards renewable energies), but several studies show that there’s never been such a thing as technological impossibility.

The main shortcoming in Belgium is that the country’s nuclear power plants provide a huge return to the private companies owning them, thus generating a massive lobbying.