Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-15-Speech-2-318"
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"en.20000215.13.2-318"2
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"Mr President, as others have done, I should also like to congratulate Mr Andersson for the report he has produced. He has done a great deal of work on behalf of Parliament in producing a wide-ranging consensus on what is, by any definition, a thorny issue, not just in this Parliament but in virtually every Member State.
I also welcome the Commission's communication. It was slow in coming but well worth waiting for. It could be a landmark in the development of a social Europe, providing we take it seriously and do not allow individual Member States to baulk at the steps that must be taken to implement it. We can, and must, take the unique European social model we have and reform it to fit the twenty-first century, a century which is globalising fast. I am afraid the proposals that are being put forward by Mr Herman Schmid will not deal with that globalising world.
To be successful we have to ensure that our economic policy, our employment policy and our social protection policy in its broadest sense, are integrated and that we deal with them as a whole. We have to ensure that our ECOFIN ministers and our employment ministers acknowledge that social affairs ministers have a contribution to make to the establishment of a society in Europe which is creative, has initiative and which will provide a high quality of life for all of our citizens.
This is not an option for us any more. It is an imperative. European citizens will not settle for any less than a quality of life which befits them as human beings. We do not want the US model – a model which has spectacularly failed to create the employment that is necessary to provide a decent quality of life. What it has done is increase dramatically the number of working poor in the United States. That is not what we want to do in Europe.
We have the traditions of solidarity in Europe and we have the experience of a better way of doing things. But we have to grasp the tools to do that. I therefore urge that we not only implement the high-level group as proposed by the Commission but also go further and have a Luxembourg-type process so that we have an integrated approach to this issue of social protection."@en1
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