Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-06-16-Speech-1-167"
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"en.20080616.25.1-167"2
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"Mr President, the Left Group in the European Parliament approves the report presented by our honourable colleague and hence endorses the goal of the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion. The report very clearly spells out the wide implications of poverty and social exclusion, not only as a social problem but also, and more especially, as a personal problem for those caught in the poverty trap. Several references have already been made to the 78 million people, including 19 million children, who are living in poverty within the European Union.
If serious efforts are to be made to combat poverty and eradicate it as a social problem, however, specific binding political strategies are essential. Political aims and a guaranteed individual right to live in freedom from poverty and social exclusion are on the agenda. These, however, are precisely the things for which the European Union makes no provision. The main political strategies of the European Union have nothing to do with combating poverty. Economic growth and job growth do not reduce poverty. Even the Union’s richest Member States are registering growing numbers of people who live below the poverty line or below the at-risk threshold. In Germany in particular, recent years have seen a fall in the level of low incomes but a rise in the number of people who earn them.
Employment in the EU, in other words, does not automatically lead to the prevention of poverty, and I am sorry to say that awareness of this fact within the European Commission and among the Member States has not generated any specific packages of measures involving objectives such as the introduction of a minimum wage above the at-risk threshold or the solution of the problem of basic social security to which Mr Kusstatscher referred."@en1
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