Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-19-Speech-3-355"
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"en.20081119.23.3-355"2
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". – Madam President, it is interesting how we often see the declining birth rate etc. as a problem. This is not necessarily the case if it means that we are then starting to share some of the inordinate wealth that we have at European Union level with people coming from other countries and that we look at technical innovation and how we can increase productivity and maybe even produce fewer of the rubbishy goods that clutter up our lives and our planet at the moment.
Of course, there is also an issue about making the best use of the potential labour force. This is why the anti-discrimination directives in the field of employment are crucially important and why it is essential that Member States implement those properly. They should also look at the barriers to phased retirement – issues such as: if you cut your working hours, what does that do to your pension; what does it do to your life and access to benefits?
We also ought to consider what is happening in the current financial crisis with regard to a lot of our thinking in this area. We are likely to see more older workers being laid off, because people are not implementing the anti-discrimination legislation properly, with all the implications for many of them of perhaps never getting back into work.
There will be others who will find it even more difficult to start their working lives or to find promotion to build up their pensions: all those aspects of what happens if you are not working for a period of time. There is the question of disaffection amongst the young who cannot find work, for whom it becomes more difficult, and of course the problems that many people will face when their private or occupational pension schemes are not able to pay out in the way that they thought they would.
So we also need to look at the demographic situation in the context of the current crisis and how we are going to use this opportunity in terms of increasing training. We should use that as a way of helping people to improve their skills, perhaps to find pathways to less physically demanding work – something that we have been saying for a considerable period of time needs to be done. We should look at how we might increase the higher-education qualifications of a number of people who never had that opportunity in their youth.
We now have the opportunity to look at certain of the elements that we know are problematic and really begin to look forward to how we are going to tackle the demographic situation."@en1
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