17
Jan
2024
Watch
Quality jobs in a competitive future-oriented social market economy (topical debate)
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the social market economy is a founding pillar of the European Union and is based on the principle that there can be no real economic development without social progress. I am a bit surprised, however, by the debate we are having today, because in reality we have talked about quality jobs in these five years, first because of the pandemic and then for the whole issue related to the change in the production models of the ecological transition and the digital transition. Yet today the right-wing forces want to tell us what their vision is, what "quality places" mean on our continent, where in reality they have abandoned the social market model and feed more than anything else the throwaway culture, in which poverty is normal and in which it is legitimate to enrich oneself at the expense of the weakest. I see this attitude again in my own country, in Italy, where the debate on the directive on the minimum wage and the principle that starvation pay is exploitation have been deregulated by the Meloni government as a non-priority issue for our country and for our workers. Instead, quality jobs are at the heart of the priority of the social dimension and the internal market and we, as Socialists and Democrats, will do everything to pursue these objectives.