Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-03-08-Speech-2-045-000"
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"en.20110308.7.2-045-000"2
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"Madam President, this is indeed a remarkable anniversary and it is a great responsibility to participate in this discussion.
In addition, the European Progress Microfinance Facility has recently been established to support job creation and self-employment. The Facility provides loans to people who have lost their jobs and want to start up or develop their own small businesses. It pays special attention to women and young people. A budget of EUR 100 million has been made available over four years but can be increased to more than EUR 500 million in the joint initiative with the international financial institutions.
Over the last ten years, EU cooperation under the open method of coordination on social inclusion and social protection has helped to raise awareness and promote the fight against poverty and social exclusion. The European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion set the frame to reduce poverty across the whole range of policy areas. Let us do our utmost to make sure it achieves its aim.
First of all, I wish to thank the rapporteurs from the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality and the associated Committee on Employment and Social Affairs respectively for their report. This report is very timely because the issue it highlights has been on the agenda for a while, but it has become more pressing as a result of the impact of the financial and economic crisis on vulnerable groups in society.
Let me highlight some of the key elements in my employment and social policies that I believe will improve working opportunities and conditions for women. There are indeed urgent measures that the Member States need to take in these areas. For instance, they need to reduce labour market segmentation by readjusting the balance in employment protection legislation between those workers on permanent contracts and those on time-limited, precarious contracts – which is so often the case for women.
They also need to strike a better balance between work and private or family life and to remove other disincentives to participation in the workforce by second earners, who again are mostly women.
It is important to increase the employment rate in the EU and the key challenge in this area is the participation in the labour market by all workers, both male and female. I believe that the European Social Fund will have to be better and more robustly used in the future to support the demand-side policies to open new opportunities for women, especially those returning to the labour market after childbirth.
It is a source of great concern to the Commission that over 80 million people are at risk of poverty in today’s European Union. The Member States have the main responsibility for fighting against poverty, but the Union has a role to play. That is what some three-quarters – 74% – of our fellow Europeans believe, according to the Eurobarometer surveys.
The flagship initiative, the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion, includes proposals for practical measures to achieve the numerical poverty reduction target. The Platform focuses on the continuing importance of active inclusion for people furthest from the labour market. As I have already pointed out, women make up an important component of that category. In 2012, the Commission will present a communication assessing in depth the implementation of active inclusion strategies at national level.
I mentioned that more than 80 million people are at risk of poverty in today’s European Union. What is even more worrying is that over 20 million children are among them and the figure has not improved over time. Helping to lift those children out of poverty means helping to lift their parents out of poverty too, in particular, the single parents, who are mostly women. This calls for a multidimensional approach, covering employment policies to help parents find work, the design of tax benefit systems, and the provision of key services, such as housing, quality childcare and education, and protection of children’s rights. As foreseen in the Platform, the Commission intends to put forward a recommendation in 2012 on child poverty. It will outline common principles and effective monitoring tools to combat and prevent poverty in early life.
Providing the funding to meet those challenges is also crucial. Almost a third of the European Social Fund’s allocation of EUR 21.7 billion for the present programming period goes to measures to improve access to employment. In addition, almost EUR 3 billion – 2.77 to be precise – from that allocation goes to supporting self-employment and business start-ups, and the beneficiaries are very often women."@en1
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