Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-23-Speech-3-355"
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"en.20050223.21.3-355"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, there are only a few of us here in the Chamber at the moment, although in fact a great many people are listening to us in a state of anxiety and distress. Yesterday, a small delegation from that working community came to Strasbourg at their own expense. Indeed, although we may be discussing Terni, a small town in Italy, we are actually debating the future of the whole of Europe.
For those who are not familiar with it, Terni is a town in the green countryside of Umbria that is different from the others. Located in the region of Lake Trasimeno, with its little medieval towns and the mysticism of Saint Francis and the renaissance painters, Terni has, for 120 years, been a town of steel and steelworkers. Its lifeblood is the steelworks and, through innovation, it has been able to protect and to improve its production for over a century, even during the war.
There are no valid economic reasons why the production of magnetic sheet steel should be concentrated in France and Germany: in 2004 ThyssenKrupp made a net profit of many millions of euros from the Terni plant. Only a few months ago, in June, the company signed an agreement with the social partners, witnessed by the Italian Government, to revitalise production at the Terni plant, and the European Parliament voted to support the agreement.
Now the owners of the company seem to want to tear up those agreements by announcing today that 600 workers will be made redundant as of tomorrow, after having already got rid of the 370 workers in the magnetic steel sector. The letter the company sent to us Members of the European Parliament is therefore belied by the facts, as well as by the contradictions in the letter itself, and it has further convinced me that we must vote for the unified resolution that we have tabled both for substantive reasons and for the sake of democracy.
The situation is even more tragic and unacceptable when one thinks of the dignity of those European citizens and their families who have been protesting for more than a year, and of the rules for social dialogue in Europe, for which all the Community institutions have pleaded so hard, especially the Commission. We are expecting the Commission to give this Chamber some concrete answers, which so far have not been forthcoming.
If signed and sealed agreements are ignored and an already submitted investment plan is loudly denied, it is a serious matter for the whole of Europe, because it would give rise to a European Union dominated by uncontrolled relocations, industrial dismissals and speculative thinking, which would inevitably drag it into decline and crisis. Intervening in the Terni case therefore means intervening for the future of each one of us and performing a duty that upholds the genuine interests of a Europe of work and development. Furthermore, if all other approaches are constantly blocked, it would be appropriate to resort to public intervention to guarantee the future that would otherwise be denied."@en1
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