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March 2004
Speech to Social Affairs Seminar, Brussels, March 2004
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One of the strengths of yesterday's discussions was to illustrate the depth and width of the Lisbon Agenda in policy terms. In contemporary Europe all roads lead to Lisbon, or at least they should.
The Lisbon Agenda is a very good idea in danger of becoming another piece of EU jargon, but it is the context for everything we discussed yesterday and everything we will discuss today. We often talk about Lisbon in terms of wealth, or competitiveness, or dynamism, but at the end of the day, Lisbon is about work. Work for those who can do it, work when and how people wish it. Work because it is the key to prosperity. Work, because fair, safe work gives people independence and satisfaction. Sigmund Freud said: all that matters in life is love and work. The first is outside the remit of the second pillar: but work we can do something about.
Two weeks ago Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhoftstadt suggested in his Paul Henri Spaak lecture that there was a need to refine the terms of Lisbon, to move beyond the system of peer review to something much more focused and focusing. Your discussions yesterday were about soft law and the open method of co-ordination, which is very much what Lisbon is about. For that reason the Lisbon Agenda was never properly equipped to be truly focused. It is long on aspiration and - at least in terms of Member States - short on real obligation. As Netherlands liberal democrat Commissioner Frits Bolkestein has pointed out many times: the Lisbon Agenda tends more towards bark than bite.
At the end of the next Parliament we will have exhausted the timeframe we set ourselves to achieve the goals of Lisbon. There is far too little sense of urgency among the governments of the European Council. I do not doubt that Odile Quintin and her colleagues in the Commission must sometimes feel the same sense of frustration at the slow progress being made. Liberals believe we have to renew our commitment to the Lisbon agenda because the growth it aspires to deliver is the only key to better jobs, greater prosperity and greater social cohesion. For practitioners in the area of Employment and Social Affairs Lisbon is about more, and better, work, for more people.
Liberals believe a more flexible labour market - and those words are rapidly being stripped of clear meaning - is good insofar as it creates new possibilities for work where they have not previously existed. European society needs to remove many of the disincentives to work. It needs to make work pay properly. It needs to enable and encourage people to work longer and retire later. The European Liberal democrat and reform group has consistently argued that Europe needs to provide more avenues to work for women; it needs to provide more possibilities for effectively combining work and parenting; it needs to make it easier to retrain effectively, or return to the workforce. It also needs to make it easier for the thousands of hardworking immigrants who come to Europe wanting work to find that work.
Liberals have also taken a strong line on education's relationship to better work. Almost one in five Europeans still leaves school without a qualification, and this has to change. Today's unskilled teenager is tomorrow's jobless adult. In a global economy, education is Europe's comparative advantage, but we are not adding enough value for learners the first time around and we are still not encouraging enough life-long learning. So we need to produce better workers and give them more freedom to work.
But we also need to change the way we manage that work. The weight of regulation surrounding employment protection often discourages small employers from expanding and prevents companies from the kind of adaptability that lets them respond to changing demand in the market. If the costs of expanding a payroll in paperwork and protections outweighs the benefits of new staff then Europe's companies will not grow. This adds up to a staggering loss of potential.
This is overwhelmingly a continent of small businesses; overwhelmingly a continent of companies that need flexibility to prosper and grow. Of course it is crucial that we provide strong protections for workers, and that we guarantee protection for the unemployed, but to protect these things at the cost of actually generating new jobs and making it easier to work in every respect is self-defeating. In a rapidly ageing Europe it will also ultimately deprive us of the economic and fiscal resources to sustain those protections in the future.
Liberals believe that what really matters is fairness at work. The future European employment market will have to be built on a dialogue between workers and employers that is fully aware of their mutual dependence and the fact that they are all in the same European boat. I believe that too many Europeans have been wrongly sold the line that reforming our labour markets means abandoning a long European tradition of solidarity in the workplace. But I also believe that European employers need to guard against a tendency to see flexibility as a one-sided deal. Employers who look covetously at the conditions at the bottom of the American labour market are quite simply fooling themselves. Nobody wants a Europe that looks like Wal Mart. Employment is a power relationship and that means we have to handle it with care.
A flexible labour market doesn't mean junk labour. It doesn't mean weak protection for workers against unfair treatment or unacceptable standards. It means businesses and workers that are an order of magnitude more responsive to each other's needs and to their shared reality, which is that Europe now competes in a global marketplace. That its labour is comparatively expensive in global terms. That its population is ageing fast and nursing a pensions and social welfare timebomb. I am glad to welcome today Anne-Sophie Parent, President of the Platform of Social NGOs, Thérése de Liedekerke, director of Social affairs at the Union of Industrial and Employers Confederations of Europe and Reiner Hoffmann, deputy secretary general of the European Trade Union Confederation. These three know as well as any the balance that has to be struck and I look forward to hearing their perspectives.
So Liberal priorities in the legislative field are clear. We regretted last month's European Parliament request to scrap the opt-out for the working time directive. We have supported measures designed to ensure the mutual recognition of professional qualifications so that Europeans can move and work more freely within Europe. In the same spirit, we have backed attempts to help ensure that social support is also available to mobile European workers. We have called for stronger anti-discrimination measures to properly open our workplaces to all who want to work. Perhaps most importantly, we have repeatedly called for the most open possible approach to internal labour migration in Europe, especially with European enlargement. We have been deeply dismayed at the illiberal responses of too many European governments to entirely unfounded, fears of benefit tourism and job-stealing by immigrant labour. In the rural part of Britain that I come from, the agricultural economy is basically kept on its feet by hardworking migrants from continental Europe: not that you would know that from much of the British press. Europe needs more worker mobility, not less.
The reason why a meeting like today's is so important is that it is you, as representatives of national parliaments who will actually be responsible for so many of these changes on the ground. One of the strategic goals I set for my Group presidency was the extension of political co-operation and co-ordination between the ELDR group in the European Parliament and our Liberal colleagues in National and Regional Parliaments. The intention of yesterday and today is to allow us to consider our common objectives and better understand each other's work. I believe that this link with national legislators and parliamentarians makes us better European legislators, but also helps us demonstrate some of the European Parliament's added value to all of you. Particularly in this field, it is crucially important that the work we do in the European Parliament is highly sensitive to the local and cultural perspectives that national parliamentarians represent. Without effective working relationships with you that is impossible. The goal for the next legislature is to get much much further down the road to Lisbon. European Parliament, national parliaments, something we must do together
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