Speeches » May 5th 2009 - Employment Issues
May 5th 2009 - Employment Issues
Debate - Employment Summit. If Globalisation causes redundancies there will be a shortfall in revenue so the globalisation fund will be spending money you have not got.
Don't fight globalisation, join it by encouraging competition within the EU and learn how to compete on world markets. You want to renew the social agenda via the WTD which seems to have two aims.
First it was supposed to provide more jobs by limiting hours worked so that companies had to take on more staff. But extra staff means extra costs of social taxes so that unit costs rise. Small companies then become uncompetitive, lose orders, causing short time or even closure. Workers then have no job at all, how social is that? Second it was meant to result in more time with the family but what use is that if the take home wage is then insufficient? How social is it if the family is deprived of some of the nice things of life? Let individuals work out their own salvation.
Many countries have a minimum wage structure and I support that; we do not wish to see the social ills of people exploited. But the EU has now destroyed even that with one of its own institutions, the ECJ, where the rulings on "Laval" and other cases ruin member states minimum wage policies. How social is it to overturn the way National Parliaments have tried to protect workers.
These measures are nothing less than an attempt to establish a soviet style command economy and we all know how well that worked.
Derek Clark MEP Strasbourg May 5th 2009