Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-06-Speech-4-011"
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"en.20031106.1.4-011"2
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"A few years ago, the CEO at Renault, Mr Louis Schweizer, who had, incidentally, been the principal private secretary in the cabinet of France's Socialist Prime Minister in a previous life, decided, in the interest of his shareholders, to close down the Renault factory in Vilvoorde and make a few thousand Flemish workers redundant in the process. Today, with the drastic streamlining measures at the Ford Genk factories, Flanders is yet again facing a tragedy in the car-manufacturing sector. Although I hope that Mrs Smet’s optimism will prove to be justified, many people fear that the dismissal of 3 000 workers in Genk is simply heralding the factory's final closure and relocation. You sometimes hear fatalists claim that, due to increasing globalisation, nobody can prevent these relocations, but we should still maintain that the Belgian Government has a massive responsibility in this area. Commissioner, the truth is that the Belgian Government has known since January 2002 that the Genk car manufacturer was in serious trouble. After all, different media, including the weekly magazine
have also reminded us that Flemish managers warned the Belgian Government that Belgium, and thus Flemish industry – which is already being weighed down by excessive labour costs – has been placed in a bad light in the United States. Many people in Flanders suspect that the ill-considered action by
the Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister, may have played a part in the decision of the Ford management to streamline the Genk assembly works.
If Europe wants to avoid tragedies of the kind that have unfolded in Vilvoorde and Ford Genk in future, far-reaching measures will need to be taken across all EU Member States in order to guarantee to industry, too, the
Community preference, which has, quite rightly, been applied in agriculture for decades. If they are not, a region like Flanders should be able to outline socio-economic policy of its own."@en1
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