Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-26-Speech-4-011"
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"en.20050526.4.4-011"2
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".
Mr President, a social Europe in the world economy, jobs and new opportunities: that is how, in February, the European Commission summed up the social agenda for the next few years. Today, we will try to pick up where the documents left off. I therefore hope that the Commission, as indeed the Council, will accommodate, in a positive sense, the emphases which we will be placing today in the report on which we will be voting later on.
Sometimes, I have the feeling that being involved in social policy is considered to be for softies. Social policy no longer counts for a great deal in this Europe. If, however, we want to achieve the objectives, regain confidence in our society and ensure that the unemployed can return to the labour market, if we want to achieve all of that, then we will need this European social model.
When – in the context of the discussions that are currently being held in France, but also in the Netherlands – I study the new Constitutional Treaty, I notice that the social market economy is taken as a guiding principle and has implications for all the policies we implement in the European Union. In that knowledge, we must apply the social market economy in each piece of policy we lay down.
Which means that when we all consider this social agenda, then what is more important to us than anything else is achieving the Lisbon objectives, in other words obtaining jobs and creating sound and high-quality employment. This also means that we must ensure that the small and medium-sized enterprises, which are, after all, the driving force behind more and better jobs, are given every opportunity. That is what Lisbon is about.
Lisbon also means, however, that we must ensure that people who are now being sidelined, are unable to work or are disabled, as a result of which they are unable sufficiently to reconcile work with a professional life, are also given a chance on the labour market by means of the social framework which we would like to have in Europe. It also means that, with the remaining capacities they have, people with a work disability are given another chance on the labour market thanks to retraining or extra training. For years – a few decades I would imagine – we have been talking about promoting retraining and extra training, about being active at all times in order to retrain for the labour market and, barring a few exceptions, this is, in fact, done far too infrequently in this field. I therefore believe that the Commissioner should put training at the top of the agenda.
Then there is the social market economy. We must have an economy that suits everybody. That also means that we must carefully examine the effects of demographic changes in our society on our social security system. If we know that, in the next few years, we will be faced with a decrease in the number of young people and an increase in the number of older people in our working population, this means that we must adapt our social security systems to those demographic factors.
The European Commission is good at analysing, but has failed to produce absolute policy in this memorandum. I hope that, with the emphases we will be placing during the vote, we will manage to make the social agenda more practical."@en1
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