Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-11-Speech-2-119"
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"en.20030311.6.2-119"2
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"Mr President, first of all, I should like to express my sincere thanks to the rapporteur for his report, which I see, moreover, as a courageous one. For the first time, some new ideas are raised, ideas which have not always come up in recent years and which also tie in somewhat with the new reality that we are now faced with, in the context of a less favourable economic situation than we have seen in recent times. That is why I find it a courageous report, and, moreover, it is not very politically correct on a number of points. I think that that is a good thing too, because if there is to be a genuine debate on employment, it cannot just be politically correct, and that is something I believe applies to this aspect as much as it does to others.
As I said, we are faced with a kind of economic slump. That is always bad news for employment, with unemployment rising, as a rule. In that case, we generally see unemployment among young people increasing more sharply than unemployment as a whole. That is because it is harder for young people to find a job than it has been in the past. The minute the situation suddenly improves, young people are the first to find a job. The minute the situation is less good, however, they are left standing. In order to prevent that happening, and precisely because we can see it coming, we should be focusing on this in particular. That does not mean that we should completely forget about the other groups we have indicated – that is, women and older people. On the contrary, you take the view that we should also continue with this, but I believe that young people need extra attention that they have not received in recent years.
I should now like to turn to the matter of comparisons. At present, unemployment in the European Union is approximately 2.5% higher than in the United States and Japan, but the differences are not as great as they seem at first glance. Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Denmark, Great Britain and Sweden are doing better than the United States. The other countries are therefore doing somewhat worse. If, however, we look at the differences, that is very alarming. It is precisely for that reason that this policy and these ideas are so important. One cannot help but see that if a country has very high unemployment and this unemployment does not go down, something is not right. There are countries that have historically had high unemployment, whose unemployment is going down. On the other hand, there are other countries that have historically had low unemployment, whose unemployment is rising. This is especially the case if one part of such a country is doing well and another part is not. In Germany, for example, which is of course our greatest concern at the moment, there are states that are simply at the European level. How is that possible? That is a very interesting question. It is not a valid approach to only look at the countries, but also at the regions. That is the way to bring it together."@en1
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