Dear colleagues,

the European economy faces great problems: crises on the financial markets, rising prices for energy and food, a shrinking domestic demand due to wage dumping and social demolition, the extension of precarious employment – all these are urgent problems that need to be addressed.

Yet, there can be no question of that. Of course, the report calls "for the rise in incomes to keep pace with medium-term growth in productivity". At the same time, however, the Report demands a continuation of the neoliberal structural reforms – even though these alleged „reforms" have only produced the problems that we are confronted with today. Instead of creating jobs by public investments, the pressure on employed and unemployed is to be increased further, work times are to be prolonged and the protection against dismissal is to be undermined. Instead of intervening in a regulating way into financial markets and capital traffic, governments look on helplessly how the current financial crisis spreads ever further. And instead of ending the liberalisation policy that has substantially contributed to price increases on the energy market, governments continue to put their stakes obstinately on deregulation and privatisation.

Our group will not support a report that buttresses a neoliberal agenda, that kicks social rights with its feet and produces ever new crises. What we need is a radically different economic policy, where the interests of the employed and the unemployed enjoy precedence before the profit interests of big business!