Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-10-Speech-3-136"
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"en.20040310.4.3-136"2
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".
Mr President, this is the last time that I, as rapporteur of the Committee on Social Affairs and Employment, together with Mr Ettl, can pass judgment on the preparations of the candidate Member States in the social field. I have to say that all those countries have made unbelievable efforts to make progress in the social sphere on various fronts. They have a number of trump cards which they can play and about which far too little is known, certainly in our countries, where people often think that the new Member States are still at an early stage of development. Needless to say, that is not the case. For example, the population is very well educated: 88% of 20 to 24-year-olds have at least attended higher education. That is more than in the 15 current Member States, where this figure is 74%. Moreover, the population in the ten new countries is younger than in the 15 current Member States. The phenomenon of an ageing population will therefore take a little longer to make its presence felt.
In short, those countries have great potential in terms of human resources. Utilising this potential to the full should be high on the agenda. At present, human resources are still deployed insufficiently. Unemployment in the acceding countries is high and opportunities for employment low. Of the population of working age, 14.3% are unemployed, as against 8% in the European Union. Unemployment among young people under the age of 25 has taken on tragic proportions: at 32%, it is twice that of the European Union. An extreme case is Poland, where youth unemployment is 41%. Moreover, in seven of the ten candidate Member States, youth unemployment in 2003 rose compared to the year before. It is therefore obvious that those countries, in accordance with the European employment strategy, should develop active and sustainable employment policy. Lifelong learning should keep workers deployable within the changing labour market. The number of people between 25 and 65 who attended courses in 2002 is 5% compared to 8% in the European Union and there is also the risk of a brain drain of highly-qualified staff.
Another point is health and safety at work. Some countries prefer to provide higher wages at the expense of health and safety provisions on the shop floor. Purchasing power and pre-tax income are far below the EU average, but they have increased – even considerably – while they fell in our countries. This amounts to a simply outstanding achievement. A big problem, however, is that wages remain too low to enable people to escape poverty. Poverty in the ten countries concerned affects 40% of the working population. Social security should be developed more effectively. Social partners should be organised more effectively because at the moment, they still have insufficient organisational power to be able to really organise social negotiations in the countries concerned."@en1
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