Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-05-13-Speech-2-281"
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"en.20030513.12.2-281"2
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"Mr President, let me begin by congratulating our colleague Mr De Rossa on his work on this report and welcoming both the directive and the parallel statute for cooperatives.
I want to put to one side the debate that we are having on the legal basis and talk about the very important issue of employee participation, which should be to the fore for us in the European Parliament tonight. I want to support the rapporteur and the amendments which he has brought forward, in particular in relation to cooperatives that are involved in mergers and in relation to gender balance. Speaking personally, in terms of my work on corporate social responsibility in this Parliament – I am also speaking at the umbrella organisation of cooperatives across Europe at a conference in Paris next Monday – it is certainly true to say that cooperatives are leading the way in terms of socially responsible business practice and deserve the credit for doing so.
This debate is about support for workers who are coming together to own and work together in their enterprise for better ends. That cooperative principle dates not least from the work of Robert Owen in my own Member State and is something which we celebrate in this debate. It is also about successful business, which is a core and mainstream part of the economy. Just one recent report produced by the Work Foundation and by Birkbeck College in the United Kingdom showed graphically how employee involvement actually goes together with business success: the two go hand in hand. That is true in my own constituency in the east of England, where we are not simply talking about a very significant part of the economy where cooperatives are active, but also about socially useful employment at one and the same time. For example, there is a leading cooperative that provides care in rural areas in the east of England so that the elderly and disabled are able to get services that otherwise they would be denied and that creates work at the same time. Another example can be found in Harlow, Essex – in my constituency – where we have five separate credit unions, cooperatives that provide money and loan finance which is otherwise unavailable to people on low incomes and with poor credit records. They have over 1 000 members in a town of just 76 000 people. This provides extremely valuable employment indeed.
The principles in supporting this directive are clear. It is going to give legal certainty and positive status at European level to cooperatives, something for which we have argued for a long time. It is entirely voluntary, no one is made to sign up to this, no one has a European rule foisted upon them. It is a definition, which is inevitably a compromise, of what cooperative enterprise is about, to which the cooperative movement itself across Europe has agreed.
Finally, we have had a long saga about the European company statute tonight: we celebrate the movement towards the end of the long saga about cooperatives. But I say to the Commissioner and to everyone else in this Chamber: let us move next to the statute on associations, so that non-governmental and voluntary organisations can enjoy legal status too. This entire package has taken far too long. This is an important step tonight, but we must look forward to the next to be achieved."@en1
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