Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. I want to begin by stating that unemployment is increasing in Europe, increasing in Germany, increasing in France and increasing in other Member States. The economy has stagnated, and the European Employment Strategy faces major challenges. It must become much more effective. A look at the research behind the Commission’s report leaves one in no doubt as to what are the biggest practical problems for the European employment process. They are that it is not being implemented effectively enough in the Member States, that it has only marginally influenced the national employment strategies and that it is, in general, unknown to the actors in the labour market. This pattern must be broken. The European employment strategy must be combined with the national employment strategies in the Member States and must also be rolled out at regional and local levels. The question that arises, however, is that of how this is to take place. My answer is clear and unambiguous. The national and regional parliaments must be allowed to debate and decide on the national action plans. It may perhaps appear self-evident that national action plans should be decided upon and discussed in the national parliaments, but that does not in actual fact happen in any Member State today. It is all the more important that it should do so inasmuch as it is the parliaments that, in approving national employment policies, also appropriate the financial resources needed if the policies are to be put into practice. A national action plan that comes from Europe and has no connection with the parliaments will naturally be ineffective, as will the attendant budgetary process. That is an incredibly important issue. I also believe that the Commission’s reports concentrate very much upon how European cooperation is to be developed, coordinated and synchronised. I think that is very good, but I want to make two observations. First of all, administrative coordination must also result in coordination in the working environment. It is not enough for officials to cooperate better across borders. Instead, something must also happen out in the labour markets. New jobs and more employment must be created. Otherwise, the result is all talk and no action. Secondly, the Commission’s synchronisation report is concerned, to my surprise, with only two processes, namely the economy and employment. I wonder what happened to the social process. Coordination must of course be based upon all three processes. They are all equally important, and each has its contribution to make. If the social process were to be squeezed out, integrated overall solutions would soon be replaced by the perspective of the employer alone. The result would then be conflict and strife instead of constructive cooperation. I would therefore urge the Commission to stick by the Lisbon decisions, which emphasise both economic growth and social integration, which give just as much weight to the quality of working life as to the quantity of work produced and which make full employment, viewed in the light of sustainability, a prime objective. I also want to underline the value of the open method of coordination, which invites the Member States to take part in a learning and development process that can be far more effective than the traditional way in which legislation is steered through. The method is still in its infancy. It needs to be developed and implemented more consistently, especially within the individual Member States where it can be combined with entrepreneurship and development strategies that create both jobs and a qualified work force. I should finally also like to address the absent Council of Ministers, which will meet on 8 October and say that it is not enough to take certain steps to simplify a bureaucratic European cooperation process. There is also a need to set political priorities and to take practical initiatives that will lead to action and that are based on the decisions taken in Lisbon. We also need important changes in the Member States if we are ever to obtain a coordinated and effective European employment process. We therefore require a bottom-up process to complement the present top-down process at European level.

Political group: GUE-NGL