Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-15-Speech-2-322"
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"en.20000215.13.2-322"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, the aim of developing a coordinated strategy for modernising social protection in the European Union is certainly an admirable one. Just as the launching of a European convergence strategy on employment and labour market policies at the Luxembourg Summit was commendable.
The labour market and social protection are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, that require harmonised policies and rules. If the labour market functions by means of certain levels of employment, flexibility and salary discipline, then it is impossible for the welfare state and social protection not to function, and vice versa.
Until recently, the European countries fixed, it could be said in an autarkic way, the rules governing the functioning and financing of the two markets. Budgetary and exchange rate policies were responsible for maintaining internal and external stability. With the Maastricht Treaty and the single currency, budgetary discipline became tighter and recourse to devaluation ceased as a means of endeavouring to restore marginal competitiveness. The structural and economic differences of the various countries cannot, therefore, be rebalanced through budget deficits and trade.
That being the case, in the absence of complete labour mobility inside the Union, and without a redistributive fiscal policy at federal level, it is left to the labour markets and welfare systems to provide what degree of flexibility there is to remedy both structural and economic disequilibria, the so-called exogenous asymmetric shocks.
And therein lies the paradox. Political and monetary convergence in Europe unavoidably entails convergence of the respective rules of the game in the labour market and welfare systems. But, at the same time, the single currency and the absence of labour mobility, as well as of a redistributive fiscal policy, force us into a situation of non-convergence in terms of salaries and welfare, in order to compensate for the differences in marginal productivity at national and regional levels.
Hypocrisy and fine-sounding words such as convergence, benchmarking, modernisation and concerted action are not going to extricate us from those contradictions. Either the European Union becomes a genuine federal state with a genuine redistribution of resources, genuine free movement of workers and therefore – but only at that point – common labour and welfare regimes, or it would be better not to deceive and be deceived by hopeless paths to convergence which sound impressive but which, in reality, only cause harm, above all to the most vulnerable. That is something we would do well to recognise."@en1
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