On reading the Commission’s statement on social protection, which is animated by so many good intentions, one wonders whether its authors and the working people in Europe are living on the same continent and in the same social reality. One also wonders whether this ‘coordinated modernisation strategy’ is not just another misrepresentation of the coordinated and headlong attack on social protection and security and on the acquired rights of working people. We agree with many of the rapporteur’s remarks but do not at all share his optimism about the Commission’s and the Council’s intentions and plans concerning social protection. The general lines of the implemented economic policy, the Stability Pact and the strict convergence programmes, which are a constant menace to employment and which promote employability and the flexibilisation of labour relations, and the organisation of labour, along with Commission and the ESF decisions relating to salary and wage restraint, and the insistence upon austere budgetary discipline and upon achieving much-vaunted monetary stability at all costs, leave no doubt about the new strategy’s objectives and aspirations. Its sole purpose is to pave the way and create the right conditions for cutting public expenditure on social security, and for flexibilising social protection itself. When social security has repeatedly, and in the words of many influential people, been characterised as a ‘cost’ and an ‘obstacle’ to greater competitiveness and when ways are being sought to transfer that cost from companies to working people – always, of course, on the pretext that this will create jobs – it would surprise us if the existing model of market economy without accountability, with its dismal monetary-economic approach to everything and total dependence on monopolistic interests, were to take under its protection the fundamental right of the citizens to social protection and care. Clearly, what is being attempted is to move away from organised systems of social security under state control, towards systems based on private insurance agencies, which will generate new profits for capital and place even greater burdens on working people, who besides the higher cost, will ‘enjoy’ even more degraded social provisions. The fostering of illicit competition between public and private social security systems and between the systems of the Member States is not only unjustifiable, but, on the contrary, makes manifest the political expediencies and intolerable pressures imposed upon social security systems to weaken or even do away with them, to the benefit of the private sector and the law of profit. It is well known that the level and quality of employment determines the quality of social security systems. So how is it possible to speak about healthy and economically sustainable social security systems when we are faced with the millions of unemployed, impoverished and marginalised people, the ‘working poor’ of part-time employment, and working conditions that are dissociated from the policies implemented? Social security and protection are among the greatest acquisitions of working people in Europe, and were achieved after many years of battling against the aspirations of big business, and by the constant expression of the solidarity that characterises working people. Today, in the Europe of unemployment and underemployment, it is urgently necessary to establish broader social protection and to extend the rights of working people, but this demands a different system of economic and social development, which the EU cannot possibly create, because of its nature and character. On the basis of these views, we wish to express our categorical opposition to the ‘modernisation’ of the social protection system that the Commission statement is promoting, and to make it clear that we cannot vote in favour of the report by the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs which is under discussion.

Political group: GUE-NGL