Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-14-Speech-3-247"
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"en.20070314.19.3-247"2
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".
Mr President, Airbus was the cutting-edge industry that was meant to make us swallow the loss of our iron and steel industry and accept the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in textiles, and that same Airbus is now on the rack, preparing to sacrifice its workers and its sub-contractors – quite an achievement for a company whose order books are full for six years and which has EUR 4 billion in the bank.
Airbus would be able to face the future with confidence if it were not ravaged by the financial cancer that is free-market liberalism, and I can tell the House that jobs and development do not sit comfortably with a policy of keeping the euro strong nor, above all, with the greed for dividends characteristic of private shareholders who seek to cut back on investment in the necessary human and material resources and who put their trust in financiers rather than in the expertise of the workers.
The fact is that, by doing away with 10 000 jobs and dividing by six the number of sub-contractors, the ‘Power 8’ plan is eating away at those things that make Airbus rich: its workers’ know-how and the network of sub-contracting businesses on whose cooperation it could rely. It was that cooperation that made Airbus a high-performing business, and that is the reality of what ‘Power 8’ is going to destroy by making workers, sites and nationalities compete against each other, something that the workers are quite right to repudiate. ‘Power 8’ fails to respond to the present and future needs of the business and should, for that reason, be withdrawn. If Airbus is to overcome its difficulties, a return to largely public ownership and funding is what is called for, for the fact is that only the Member States are capable of taking on aeronautical projects of this size.
Moreover, the Commission must resolutely defend before the WTO the system of repayable advances by which means alone it will be possible to fund the A350 and the NSR, and it must also make sure that the company gets low-interest loans from the EIB. If our aerospace industry is to have a future, a European fund for research, employment and training needs to be set up as a matter of urgency. Within the space of ten years, 30% of EADS’ staff are going to be retiring; if their know-how is not to be lost, a massive plan for recruitment and training is called for. The aerospace industry will have immense challenges to cope with – ranging from the revolution in composite materials to the death of oil – and it is our duty to help it do that."@en1
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