ABSTRACT
Social dumping first entered the UK political vocabulary in 1993 when the US multinational Hoover decided to close a plant in eastern France and shift production to Scotland, where the workers made significant concessions on labour costs. The British government subsequently held up the Hoover case as justification for its job-creating opt-out from the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, while the French government complained bitterly about the dangers of unfair competition from the ‘Taiwan of Europe’. If social dumping is the idea that capital will flow to areas where labour is cheapest and least protected, dragging down the labour standards elsewhere, the Hoover case seems a classic example-at least of the first half of the equation. Good illustrations of both elements are harder to find, although one rather unusual case emerged in Germany at the same time as the Hoover affair. In the early 1990s Mercedes Benz toyed with the idea of building a new plant for its A-class mini-car in Britain or the Czech Republic. Eventually it stayed in Germany but only after concessions on operating costs said to estimate DM200m were wrought from I G Metall, the German metal union.1
