Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-02-Speech-2-027"
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"en.20080902.4.2-027"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, this new social agenda comes late in the day and it is a feeble response to the precarious situation, inequalities and effects of recession currently plaguing the workforce and many of our fellow citizens in Europe.
With more than 70 million people in poverty, even where unemployment levels are falling, with precarious living and working conditions and the growth of atypical forms of employment, we really do need a solid social base, a Europe that protects us. This is one of the focuses of the French EU Presidency. And as you said, Minister, 2008 was supposed to be a come-back year, the year in which social Europe was re-energised. Regrettably, your Government did not make the social dimension one of the four priorities for its Presidency. As we approach the end of the European Commission's term we have proposals, some of which, it must be said, do at last reflect things which the European Parliament and our Group in particular has called for: a genuine directive against discrimination in all areas, not just disability; at long last the raising of moves to strengthen and revise the directive on European works councils, and measures to ensure that our existing principles and laws on equal pay for men and women are properly upheld in the Member States.
But just look at the shortcomings, the gaps in this new social agenda! I will name two of them in particular. One is the response to recent judgments by the European Court of Justice in the Laval, Rüffert and Viking cases, which weaken our resistance to social dumping in the European Union. We think that the assurance given in the Commission's communication, that the Commission will provide legal clarity and interpretative guidelines on this directive, is not enough. Due note must be taken of the fact – and we have held Parliamentary hearings organised by the Employment and Social Affairs Committee – that the directive is inherently defective and that Union law must, by revising the directive on the posting of workers, make it clear that the Union's economic freedoms, freedom of establishment, cannot stand in the way of fundamental workers' rights, the right to collective bargaining, rights on pay, the right to strike in defence of their interests, if need be.
So we want the revision of this directive to be placed on the agenda and we want a social safeguard clause guaranteeing that in future no directive, no Union policy, no treaty principle can be applied to the detriment of workers' rights; so that where one country has a higher standard of workers' rights than another, that higher standard can never again be lowered by invocation of the country of origin principle, as we saw with the first version of the services directive – the Bolkestein directive.
Secondly, Mr Bertrand tells us that social services of general interest, operations in the general interest, should be encouraged for the wellbeing of our social model. But we have had no proposal for a directive on services of general
interest. We cannot properly protect social services of general interest and implement Article 14 of the Lisbon Treaty, which provides the legal base for such services to be commissioned and funded, unless the Council puts a request to the Commission and unless the Commission uses its right of initiative so that we can at last talk about a legal framework that will protect public service operations, guarantee the independence of local authorities in the local services they provide and give us the assurance that future Court of Justice rulings will not threaten this fundamental feature of the European social model, so that people feel, not as Mr Schulz said, that Europe works against their social model but on the contrary that the Commission and the other European institutions work to safeguard it."@en1
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"economic"1
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