Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-27-Speech-3-153"
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"en.19991027.5.3-153"2
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"Mr President, we will be very interested in the conclusions of the enquiry that you are going to lead because we are also signatories to this resolution and we made the same observations.
What we have all been saying for a while is that, in fact, the goal being pursued by a growing number of companies who are restructuring is to provide their shareholders with more and more guarantees, and to ensure ever greater profitability for their financial investments. That is why the management of the Michelin Group simultaneously announced the axing of 7,500 jobs and fantastic profits. That is why, as you pointed out, announcements of redundancy plans are always followed by a rise in the share prices of the companies concerned.
This violent expression of scorn for employees and their lives fundamentally contradicts our stated objectives in favour of employment, social and regional cohesion, and the European Social Model. What do you expect the employees who are being made redundant from the Wolbert-Michelin factory at Soissons to think of these objectives and our determination to take them forward? The social desperation that these decisions generate is inevitably transformed into political desperation and this political desperation is a permanent threat to democracy.
That is why the European Union must make its actions match its words and must uphold its commitments to employment and to the right to live in dignity. How can it do so now, at the moment, when it is confronted with the brutal, unilateral decisions of huge companies? First of all, the European Union must unequivocally condemn this type of decision and support the employees concerned. No, Mr Pronk, huge companies do not have the authority of divine right for their decisions. It is the responsibility of politicians to intervene and to say what they think of these decisions.
The European Union must also acknowledge the end of a magical formula that all the European Institutions keep trotting out, according to which growth plus competition would necessarily equal employment and development. This is wrong and has been proved to be so! We will have to draw conclusions from such a statement, in order to bring ourselves to reconsider the foundations of our European employment strategy and of our economic guidelines. We must provide for increasing the power of employees and their representatives in order to strengthen their right to contest the basis for the economic reasons behind their redundancy, which we shall call the Wolbert-Michelin amendment and which we shall submit for your vote tomorrow. It is not acceptable for the definition and the management of the general interest to be hijacked by the economic decision-makers. Neither by bowing down to shareholders nor by injecting authoritarian nationalist populism…"@en1
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