Debate contributions by Rudi KENNES

Mr President, in 2017, the European Union made a promise to its citizens with the Pillar of Social Rights. The European Union would be more than a market, more than just a tool for big capital. It was a promise of social protection and decent work. Almost nine years later, the result is painfully clear. Not much has come of that promise. As multinational profits hit record highs and defense budgets exploded, workers saw their purchasing power evaporate and their rent become unaffordable. We have always known that social rights in this Union are subordinate to market logic and stifling fiscal rules, but today the Commission is not even trying to keep up appearances. Mrs Mînzatu, do not let the promise of social rights die a silent death. Show that the European Union can also mean something for workers. Take advantage of the upcoming fair labour mobility package and the Quality Jobs Act to come up with binding legislation for workers. We've had enough of good words and promises by now.

Mr President, Commissioner, for decades trade unions have accused companies of shutting down factories, making millions of people unemployed and moving production abroad to exploit foreign workers. We see the consequences of that today. We hardly produce anything. Our economies are not competitive and we are desperately trying to protect what is left of our industry by imposing tariffs on those who have been smarter than us. Many in this House blame the green transition, but that is wrong. That's a lie. We cannot continue to rely on fossil fuels, nor can we avoid modernity. The debt lies entirely with the companies and governments who, despite knowing what investments were needed, have wasted a large part of our taxpayers' money. Our employees deserve at least the recognition that they have already paid for these mistakes. The EU needs to put things right and take action to support them. Companies have responsibilities. They must invest, retrain workers, consult with them and prevent redundancies. If the companies have no obligations, they simply do nothing. It is the job of this Parliament to represent the workers and ensure that the costs of the transition are passed on to those who can afford it. That is why we need a directive. That is why you must all vote in favour tomorrow. And if you don't, please stop telling your constituents that you do care about them.

Mr President, on Thursday, European ministers will decide whether to use the frozen Russian money to keep the war machine running. This is not a neutral financial intervention, but a continuation of the dangerous escalation and militarization logic that we continue to hear in one piece. The same goes for the NATO boss Rutte, who actually wants to talk Europe into a third world war. Today, it is Russian money that is subject to the rules. But who are we going to make exceptions for tomorrow? Just for the EU citizen's money? If this experiment fails, who will pay the bill? The working class again? No way! These billions will not bring peace. They will only send more young lives into the meat grinder. In the meantime, European citizens have checked: lagging wages, unaffordable retail prices, a housing crisis and the care that is being demolished. There is no money for all these problems. The solution lies not in more weapons and not in the deprivation of Ukraine by anyone, but in peace negotiations based on real solidarity of the working class. That is the role that the EU should play, not as an accomplice in this imperialist battlefield.

Madam President, dear Commissioner, every time China imposes a kind of trade restriction, the EU response is to escalate, as if we are not doing exactly the same thing. Doesn't China have the right to protect its interests in the same way that we protect ours? And why is our protectionism justified, but theirs is called aggressive? We should have invested more strategically, built up stronger supply chains, developed a proper industrial strategy, but we did not. We relocated, closed and sold out factories, and we fired millions of workers. What did we expect? China simply did what we should have done: invest in our economy, in our infrastructure and, above all, in our people. The question should not be how do we fight China, but how do we rebuild our industry and our economy? The other question is: how do we engage with other competitive economies? The correct answer should be instead of organising trade wars, we have to build a fair trading system based on multilateralism, dialogue and cooperation.

Mr President, Commissioner, you said the EU budget is nothing more than politics expressed in numbers, a reflection of choices and priorities. I agree. Over EUR 130 billion for defence – five times more. EUR 18 billion for military mobility – ten times more. Border management tripled and EUR 15 million extra for the wine sector. Your concerns are not those from the European people. You invent imaginary threats to divert attention from the real threats: not being able to pay your bills, healthcare and housing. Not one word on wages and pensions, and nothing for the 1.3 million homeless people. You vilify and demonise migrants, but you know they are escaping our wars and climate disasters. They look after our elderly, they clean our hospitals, they cook in our canteens. Without them, our economies and societies would collapse. You say you want an independent Europe, but then you take your orders from NATO. We can make Europe a place where everybody is treated with respect, or we can let it be a racist fortress. You make your choices – we will continue to fight them.

Mr President, these are not good times for workers' rights. The von der Leyen Commission has decided to launch the attack on all fronts. But tomorrow we will vote on the revision of the directive on European Works Councils. This is a huge opportunity to achieve an improvement from Brussels for workers across Europe, an improvement for which we, together with the trade unions, have been fighting for sixteen years. Will it be perfect this time? Probably not. But it is definitely a step forward. This review will strengthen employee participation in their company. As former Vice-President of the European Works Council of General Motors Europe, I know perfectly well what is needed to improve employee participation. And that is crucial, because employee participation is good for the entire industry. Employees know their businesses better than anyone else and know what needs to be done to improve business. Research shows that companies that better involve their employees in important decisions work better than companies that don't. Employees have much more to offer their companies than just their hands. We must therefore not miss this opportunity and must finally give workers what they are entitled to. I look forward to the vote. At last it will become clear which parties are actually committed to the interests of working people and the question will be answered whether the right side of this parliament will betray those workers as always. I already have a suspicion.

Mr President, on the right side of this Parliament we hear that the future ban on cars with internal combustion engines must be reversed. This would supposedly be necessary to save European production and European jobs. But nothing is less true. This reversal serves only to secure the automotive industry’s short-term quarterly profits – an industry which, moreover, was hopelessly late in investing in green production and therefore missed the boat. Instead of investing in cheap electric cars, they continued to focus massively on heavy, polluting cars, while moving their production en masse to countries where workers are hardly paid and have little to no rights. Should European car workers pay the price, now that it turns out that this industry is not ready for the future at all? Definitely not. We must not be deceived by the lies of the right. European car workers do not benefit from a car industry that is heading towards the abyss at full speed. They need an industry that is ready for the future.

Mr President, Commissioner, what was the role of the EU in supporting peace efforts for Gaza? Nihil, zero, noppes, nada. European powers are repeating today the most abhorrent colonial racism that we thought would finally be a thing of the past. Not only are European leaders today redrawing the borders of Palestine without the Palestinians, but they are also simply watching women and children being massacred, without doing anything. Babies left in incubators to die do not form a red line. People in the Middle East are treated like mosquitoes, with no right to exist or defend themselves. Their struggle for survival is just an annoying stick in the wheel of our arms sales. These two years will therefore be remembered as an era in which this Commission and our governments tacitly authorised genocide and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. They should be ashamed. History will not acquit them and I hope that the judges in The Hague will not.

Mr President, I would also, of course, like to thank, on my behalf, all the firefighters and all those who have worked for civil protection and the like for all that they have done during this summer's catastrophe. After all, many of them have paid a high price, even with their lives. I am pleased that much is now being said and promised, but I also hope that something is actually being done. I am Belgian, just like the Commissioner. There were no forest fires with us, but some time ago we had floods. These are also natural phenomena. Many promises can be made, but I see in many Member States that emergency services are being cut back. It should be borne in mind that the protection of civilians is not only done by soldiers, but also by emergency services, by firefighters and by civil protection personnel. I therefore hope that a little more thought will be given here: less blind spending on military equipment and more investment in emergency services.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I do not know how you feel, but at least I am very ashamed. We have apparently already forgotten all the victims, as well as all the sacrifices made by our parents and grandparents to build a Europe of peace and justice after the chaos, hatred and the more than 80 million deaths during the two world wars. I thought we were done with colonialism, with white supremacy, with torture, with a waste of billions of guns. And yet we're here today and we're just looking on our cell phones at children and patients being burned alive, disabled civilians being torn apart by army-trained dogs, babies being left in incubators to die, doctors being tortured, hospitals and schools being bombed, journalists being killed and prisoners being raped, caesarean sections to be administered without anaesthesia. Colleagues, I appeal to your sense of ethics. We cannot and should not allow our leaders to make us complicit in all of this. We can't leave the world to psychopaths again. Our representatives must work for a world of peace and prosperity, not death and destruction.

Mr President, today we remember the millions who died fighting against fascism. And yet colleagues here wanted to give the Nobel Prize to a billionaire who does the Roman salute. Those nostalgic of fascism has no idea what it was like. The brutality, starvation and terror. The similarities today are worrying: criminalisation of dissent, militarism, poverty, disdain for workers and human rights. Fascism come back at times of economic and moral crisis when people's basic needs are not met they get frustrated. They are told they should blame refugees and not the greed of billionaires and the corruption of politicians. They think that the right wing populist will take care of them. Well they won't. Just like in the 1930s, fascist and liberal work together only in the interest of capital. If we really want to pay homage to the heroes who died for our freedom, we must stop sliding towards World War III and instead invest in our economies and societies. Anti-fascism today means promoting a Europe of peace and prosperity and saying no to war. Long live the Europe of peace born out of the resistance!

Mr President, ArcelorMittal made a profit of EUR 1.2 billion last year. In January 2024, the company received €850 million to decarbonise its production. In November 2024, the company announced its intention to close two plants and relocate jobs outside Europe. Flanders gave ArcelorMittal 600 million euros for the production of green steel, but this effort is now postponed due to energy insecurity. As a result, many jobs are expected to be lost in Ghent and Charleroi. Do we really need to give ArcelorMittal even more money, knowing that the company will do what it wants with it? Dismissing employees is a choice. Companies always prefer profit over people. This is capitalism. The privatisation of strategic sectors has already cost millions of jobs. These reforms imposed by the EU have not worked. The energy, automotive and steel sectors are interlinked. There is a need for an industrial policy that puts public ownership and workers at the centre. Companies, not people, have to pay for the transition through taxes. We need to demand that multinationals reinvest their profits to ensure a just transition.

Madam President, last week, the workers of the catering services in Parliament protested because management outsourced their work to private companies, and the way these companies treat them is simply not worthy of an institution that always complains about labour rights violations, but only abroad. Catering is currently outsourced to a British multinational. How do multinationals win these contracts? They place the lowest bid – which means low salaries and bad services. Today it is the catering, yesterday it was the creche, tomorrow the cleaning and also now the teachers. They all described a shocking situation: precarious contracts, huge workloads, low pay, high turnover and no certainty. These people are desperate, tired and feel humiliated. The EU should give a good example and not give contracts to these kind of industry cowboys. We want to see these services insourced, permanent good jobs, good pay and good working conditions. We will support these workers and their unions until they get what they deserve.

Madam President, Commissioner, colleagues, 'restructuring' – it's a kind of newspeak, isn't it? Companies are ashamed to say 'massive firing', so they call it 'restructuring'. In Belgium, we've had a few of them – in Limburg, 3 000 people fired in Liège, in Namur 500 people. How long will we allow the lives of workers to be collateral damage? Restructuring also happens in the public sector, which has been privatised. Automotive, steel, energy, chemical, airlines, communications, railways, mail, banks, insurance – you name it. Privatised and then restructured. No job security any more. Bosses want no rules, no administrative burdens. Governments want to run everything like a business, including healthcare. There is no funding for public services, but always for weapons. This cannot go on. You can't fix neoliberalism by putting a plaster on it, just like you cannot put lipstick on a pig. We need to put ordinary people at the heart of Europe. If you have a bad employer, it shouldn't be you who pays for their mistakes. They should respect the rules and cooperate with trade unions. We can develop a 21st century industrial policy. We can take back our public services and natural resources. We can create quality jobs and provide good services. Europe has the choice now. Continue to create uncertainty or invest and bring back a good standard of living for all.

Madam President, honourable Members, Commissioner, millions of jobs were lost in the automotive sector in the last 20 years – in Spain, Italy, France, Belgium and now also Germany. In the Commission's plan, there is one page about workers. They want to give them a little bit of unemployment benefits, then give them random jobs and waste their skills. Like Audi Brussels, for example: highly qualified workers trained to produce electric cars, now all fired. Instead of making electric cars, now they want to build weapons and move the production to Mexico. Absurd. It is the same with Van Hool, an ultra-modern bus company going bankrupt because the Flemish Government decided to buy buses outside of the EU. And the EU wakes up now, but this crisis started a long time ago, and they want again to give billions of your taxpayers' money to the same companies that created this crisis. As a former car worker, I refuse to be silent while my colleagues are getting fired by the thousands. We can make electric cars here for modern, clean mobility. We have the capacity, we have the skills, so let's do it.

Mr President, the Commission is presenting its Competitiveness Compass as a plan for growth. But in reality, it is an attack on social rights and the protection of workers. While wages are stagnating, pensions are under pressure and energy costs continue to rise, the Commission is scrapping rules for companies and pumping public funds into the arms industry. The Commission promises innovation, but refuses to break with the model that gives companies free rein. She talks about climate, but only when it can contribute to maximizing corporate profits. It lowers the thresholds for companies and increases the burden on employees. Europe has no Race to the Bottom It is necessary, but a path to social justice. What makes us stronger is investing in care, education and fair wages, not giving away taxpayers' money to support even bigger profits for multinationals. A Europe that puts people above profit is the future we are fighting for.

Mr President, Commissioner, we are constantly being told that the shortage of health workers is due to workers who demand high wages and who are fussy and lazy. But the truth is that thousands of workers are leaving this sector as a result of cuts in health care and the privatisation imposed by the European Union. The consequences are clear: poor working conditions, unbearable workload, short-term contracts, low wages, long working days, high drop-out rates, shrinking labour force and increasingly expensive education and training. Basic jobs in the healthcare sector are seen as jobs for the low-skilled. However, without these workers, who are often migrants, no one would take care of our relatives. There are so many passionate carers, nurses and young doctors who would love to continue working in the healthcare sector, but conditions are pushing them away. The EU does not have a decent policy to address labour shortages. This harms workers and patients. Health care is a basic right, not a privilege. Healthcare must remain in public hands and healthcare workers must be treated with respect.

Madam President, 'you get a tariff and you get a tariff and you all get a tariff'. This is Donald Trump's new favourite threat. At least when he's not threatening to buy or even invade your country, of course. He just announced a tariff on aluminium and steel which will have serious consequences for the European industrial sector and for industrial workers. And what's the European response? We deeply regret. Like Trump will care. It's ridiculous. Trump tariffs will hit Europe's working class hard, with higher prices and massive loss of jobs. But the EU does not care to protect its workers. No, no, no. They only care to please wealthy people like Trump, Musk and the other billionaires in the United States Government. We cannot be weak against Trump attacks. Europe needs to be strong and not by doing the same stupid things like Trump, but instead to work with other countries and partners around the globe. To fight for the working class of Europe, we need a foreign policy other than just being the lapdog of the United States.