Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-04-Speech-3-015"
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"en.20010404.2.3-015"2
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"Madam President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, other members of my Group will be speaking on various aspects of the Stockholm European Council. For my part, I shall stick to just one subject, which should, in principle, have been central to the work of the summit: the subject of employment.
The ink was not even dry on the final declaration by the Fifteen, in which you reiterated, and I quote, ‘the goal of full employment’, and in which you welcomed the initiatives taken by businesses to promote corporate social responsibility, when suddenly, like a bombshell, came the announcements that 1 780 jobs were being axed by Danone and that Marks [amp] Spencer were closing all their stores outside the United Kingdom. These are just the latest examples, so far, of shareholder value, in other words, shareholder law, and just like Michelin, Ericsson, Nokia, Telefonica and so many others, they illustrate everything that is no longer acceptable.
I ask you this, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, what are you going to do about these company directors who so brazenly thumb their noses at your declared intentions? The Commission, you write, in the conclusions of the Stockholm Summit, and I quote, will ‘present in June 2001 a Green Paper on corporate social responsibility’ and will ‘encourage a wide exchange of ideas with a view to promoting further initiatives in this area’. All well and good, but will you now, in the light of these new facts, be defining precisely what the Commission’s mandate will be? And will we, Parliament, be waiting, arms at the ready?
I suggest that we should decide to create, perhaps within the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, a new permanent body – let us call it a ‘subcommittee’, since that is the sort of language we use – which will be responsible for monitoring the strategies of major companies in Europe, a subcommittee open to contributions from trades union organisations, works committees, consumers’ associations and elected representatives.
We could thus help to create, at our level, an effective monitoring device, which would be able to put some meat on the bones of the intermediate employment objectives that the Stockholm European Council has just set itself. We already know who the first employees will be: those of the French agri-food group that I have just mentioned, whose shareholders have just seen a 17% rise in the net profit from their shares, and those of the British chain whose shares have just gone to blazes on the London stock exchange.
If we ourselves take action to demolish the divine right of the big companies to sack people as they see fit, we shall, after all, be doing nothing more than defending, by our actions, a European project that is worthy of the name, and a Parliament that is closer to the people."@en1
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