Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-17-Speech-1-080"
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"en.20100517.15.1-080"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I would first of all like to thank Mrs Lulling for the endless hours she has spent achieving a good compromise and agreement with the Council. Regardless of the variety of opinions on the individual key issues in the directive and bearing in mind that it is still being considered at second reading, I wish to confidently state that the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe concurs with the compromise decision reached so that this legislation can be introduced as quickly as possible by Member States.
Updating this legislation enables us to guarantee equal treatment for men and women, with particular attention focused on the issue of social protection, especially protection for self-employed women. This new legislative framework will allow us to ensure the same degree of protection in both cases when women are self-employed and when they are only spouses and partners of self-employed workers.
As a result of this amendment to the directive, Member States will provide standard social security entitlements, including 14 weeks’ paid maternity leave for self-employed women and for the spouses or life partners of self-employed workers.
The amendment to the directive is a sufficiently current and positive decision which will give self-employed women and the spouses or life partners of self-employed workers the opportunity to enjoy the same social security entitlements as employees do. The spouses and partners are not employees. However, it must be taken into consideration that they usually assist the self-employed worker – a practice which is widespread in my country in the agricultural sector, in small firms and in the liberal professions.
This update to the legislation will allow Member States to decide and give self-employed women and spouses assisting self-employed workers the opportunity to join a social security scheme on a voluntary or mandatory basis. This should guarantee equally well social protection and rights for women when they are employed in a family agricultural business. Along with dealing with market risks, production and the financial crisis, they must also provide for the best scheme for their own social and health insurance.
This is the only way to improve in real terms the situation of both self-employed women and their spouses and of female life partners, mainly with regard to their social and economic protection, independent of that of their spouse and partner.
I believe that this comprehensive legislative text marks a small step which is, all the same, exceptionally important in terms of equal treatment for men and women. This is the path towards achieving the strategic aim of equality of rights for men and women and towards the programme which we recently updated – Beijing +15 Platform for Action.
By making this small, but vital step, I believe that we will continue progressing towards better reproductive health programmes, a general market for European health care and insurance services and towards maternity protection and a good quality of life, regardless of geographical, social, cultural and ethnic differences. Moving in this direction provides us with the freedom to prioritise and with a helpful way of combining a career with family life, thereby establishing the sound, harmonious basis for sharing equality and responsibility between the sexes."@en1
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