Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-25-Speech-1-083"
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"en.20041025.14.1-083"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, both for myself and on behalf of my group, I wish to express our solidarity with Opel’s workers throughout Europe, but I particularly want to support the workers in Bochum who went on strike. We believe this to be an appropriate response to the management’s contemptuous attitude, for how else, other than as enormous and profound contempt can one describe it when a company plans mass redundancies, but those at the top do not think it necessary to communicate these plans to the workforce at their highly productive sites, who, instead, have to read of their fate in the newspapers?
My colleagues have already said what needs to be said about the management’s mistakes; let us talk about the work that has to be done in this field in the future, including by the Commission. If the Commission is elected – which, as things stand today, I do not think it will be – Mr Verheugen, as early as next week, will have to take on the task as part of the Lisbon strategy. I do not know if we are actually prepared, politically speaking, for what lies ahead of us. I share Mr Bullmann’s misgivings. I believe that we are a long way from having forward-looking concepts for the motor – or mobility – industry, where a lot of opportunities for innovation have been missed in recent decades. Mr Rehn spoke about research and development policy. I very much hope that the new energy crisis really will move European research policy towards enabling us, to have, at some point in the foreseeable future, 1-litre cars, that is to say, the cars of the future, built in German and European factories. There are lead markets to be opened up, and we have quite a few possibilities there, but only if we abandon the false outlook we have had to date, of ever-bigger, ever-faster cars at ever-higher prices.
Being from Lower Saxony myself, I would like to address one particular problem affecting the motor industry there, and in Germany and Europe as well. In recent years, the Commission, represented by Commissioner Bolkestein, has repeatedly attacked the VW Act, under which Volkswagen operates. It so happens that the Volkswagen Group is a living example of an innovative business culture. What the future of co-determination will be like, we see – thanks to the VW Act, at VW, with its jobshares, its wage renunciation, its 5 000 times 5 000. These are ideas from which other businesses could well learn, but this ongoing attack on the VW Act, which, in our view, does not constitute an infringement of internal market rules, is also an attack on this exemplary business culture."@en1
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