Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-15-Speech-2-022"
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"en.20010515.2.2-022"2
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"Mr President, joining together the words ‘social’ and ‘market’, as you are doing, is not enough to improve the economy. The workers, the working majority of the population, do not base their judgments on your words, but on the difficulties in their own lives and they understand all too well that what you are calling the ‘the social market economy’ is making 15 million men and women redundant in the European Union, which is actually one of the richest regions of the world.
Your social market economy, in other words, means wide-spread job insecurity and an increase in the number of workers who, even here in France, are paid FRF 4 000 or 5 000 per month and much less in other European countries, whereas shareholders, who do nothing, take their share of the dividends from the massive profits made by these companies.
So the market economy that you are glorifying in your report is a stupid, unjust and inhuman economy, which works by concentrating wealth amongst a small minority and by making the majority’s living conditions worse.
You are daring to assert that competition provides considerable protection against the abuse of power. However, it is by bringing about competitiveness and competition that the boards of directors of large companies such as Danone, Michelin, GEC-Alsthom, Péchiney, Marks [amp] Spencer and many others can perpetrate this particularly horrendous abuse of power that involves laying off some of their workers, completely closing down factories, which sometimes means that an entire town will become deserted, just so that their shareholders are guaranteed some extra dividends.
You claim that you want to overcome, and I quote, ‘the democratic deficit in European economic policy’, but the first step you must take in order to overcome this deficit would be to deprive large employers of their divine right to get rid of all the people who work to improve their existence and you would do this by banning employers from making collective redundancies and forcing them to deduct from profits and from dividends, stored up by shareholders, whatever is necessary to safeguard all the jobs that are at risk."@en1
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