Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-05-Speech-4-101"
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"en.20001005.5.4-101"2
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".
Interestingly, this is the first time that the need for the Commission’s annual reports to go further in its evaluation of the efficacy of political initiatives has been identified. What we have before us is a motion which, although not lacking in proposals for studies and research, stops well short of a real approach which will highlight crucial problems not yet resolved and the new problems which are beginning to threaten existing rights and achievements, together with their real causes.
Women are still one of the most vulnerable sections of society, whose rights are rudely trampled underfoot by the current social and economic system. That is what we should have acknowledged first, then we would not have had such a knee-jerk report singing praises and dispensing declarations of intent.
Equal opportunities at work, equal social participation, equality in health and elsewhere are impossible within a framework of reactionary policies offensive to human dignity as a whole, without equal social prospects, in a society of unemployment and underemployment, with no welfare state, a society in which human values are costed and commercialised.
Social rights and social achievements are not expanding; on the contrary, they are increasingly being eroded on the grounds that they are too expensive. The flexible, elastic forms of employment generously offered to women are not a sign of progress; they are sleights of hand by the economically powerful in a bid to counteract the economic crisis and safeguard competitiveness and excessive profits at the expense of workers and women. And the first victims are women, who still get less pay for the same work, who still tend to occupy inferior, unskilled jobs, who face more problems and who have unequal access to the job market. They are the first to fall foul of cuts in public spending, privatisation of the health sector, the right to health care and medical attention – never mind the right to prevention and information programmes. They work in conditions which are bad for their physical, mental and spiritual health, conditions which affect women more than men because they have to juggle so many duties and take on double and triple social roles. Even the report acknowledges that, “In addition to their general failure to substantiate the impact of policies and programmes, the reports also fail to discuss the factors behind continuing inequality.”
How can progress in resolving women’s problems and offering them institutional protection against all forms of discrimination be planned and strengthened within the framework of a social and economic system which commercialises and subjects everything to the rigours of public financial policy and the quest for greater profit? A policy of fundamental protection for women cannot be implemented unless we redirect and radically restructure our social development model. In the face of plans and practices to exploit and oppress, in the face of discriminatory tactics, we call on women to enforce and claim their demands together with men within the framework of a wide grass-roots battle front in each individual country.
Although it has some positive points, this motion merely skirts round the problem. We fear that its proclamations and good intentions are, yet again, no more than ‘lame excuses’."@en1
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