LUXEMBOURG (AP) — The European Union's highest court ruled on Tuesday that trade unions can in principle take action to prevent employers from using cheaper workers from EU countries with fewer labor rights.
But unions criticized the European Court of Justice for setting conditions to workers' hard-won right to strike collective wage deals that uphold a basic rate of pay and working conditions. The court tried to balance that against the rights of EU companies to do business anywhere in the 27-nation bloc.
The court said unions could take action to protect jobs and existing employment conditions, but it could not stop an employer from being based wherever it likes.
The case involved loss-making Finnish ferry company Viking Line, which reflagged one of its ships to the Baltic republic of Estonia — an EU member since 2004 — to take on cheaper Estonian workers and compete with other lines operating between Helsinki and Tallinn. The move angered unionized Finnish employees on the ferry.
This exposed Europe's new fault line as people from the EU's poorer eastern European nations seek work in higher-wage nations with generous welfare systems.
The Finnish Seamen's Union asked the British-based International Transport Workers' Federation to intervene. The ITF did so by formally asking its members not to negotiate with Viking Line, prompting the company to lodge a court case in England. The English court asked the EU court to give guidance on how it should interpret European law.
The Luxembourg-based court ruled that industrial action is legal ''only if it pursues a legitimate aim such as the protection of workers,'' and left it for the national courts to determine whether steps by the Finnish union and the international federation were justified.
''We would have welcomed a more clear and unambiguous recognition of the rights of unions to maintain and defend workers' rights and equal treatment and to cooperate cross border, to counterbalance the power of organized business that is increasingly going global,'' said John Monks, General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation.
The court will rule next Tuesday on a similar case where Swedish unions picketed a Latvian construction firm building a school with workers paid less than the usual Swedish rate.
Since its expansion to include eight mostly poorer eastern European nations in 2004 and two others in 2007, the EU has struggled to agree on how to allow fair competition within fractured national labor markets.
The row over which country's rules companies should follow while working in another EU state has reflected concerns about low-wage Eastern European workers threatening jobs in better-paid nations such as Finland, Sweden or France. Fears of a wave of migrant ''Polish plumbers'' led French voters to reject the EU Treaty in 2005.
Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them from the largest EU newcomer nation Poland, have taken advantage of the EU right to work abroad by seeking jobs in Britain and Ireland, two of the three nations that did not initially impose barriers to eastern European workers in 2004.