Life before
profits

Europe is a place of considerable confrontation between those who own everything and those who have almost nothing. 

This system is under attack by capitalist liberal reforms, and we need to be clear: the European institutions, with the active complicity of the governments of the Member States, have put themselves at the service of this dynamic and have enshrined this logic in text after various treaties.
Access conditions for populations are deteriorating, while access costs are rising, which degrades the standard of living of inhabitants. In this context, the European Union does not know how to respond to economic and social needs.
Competition, liberalism, and opposition to public investment remain relevant in European integration instead of putting people at the heart of public policies.
Yet new potentialities can open up based on social movements. In Europe, we are living in a moment of renewed struggles over wages, pensions, housing, feminist issues, and ecological demands. Social movements are vital points of support.

Poverty

and extreme poverty are widespread in Europe, and all public policies must be mobilised to eliminate these scandalous inequalities. It is imperative that the EU finally adopts an integrated European anti-poverty strategy that tackles the multidimensional problem of poverty and social exclusion.

Public services

must provide access to fundamental rights. For the vast majority, increased provision of public services is the only social shield to reduce the cost of living. The inflation caused by first capitalist speculation and then war shows the will of the European ruling classes to transfer the costs of the crisis to the population by putting upward pressure on prices and maximising their profits, while real wages fall and social and economic inequalities grow at a dizzying pace.

The right to housing:

Housing is a critical issue, with high prices and a lack of supply. Gentrification, speculative investment, the scarcity of affordable land, declining public funding for social housing, and inadequate regulation of the housing market are all contributing to the housing crisis. Millions of homes are unoccupied, and buildings stand empty without being repossessed.
The housing crisis results from the neo-liberal policies of the EU and its member states. The results are: more precarious housing conditions, increased evictions, repossessions and homelessness, and gentrification of neighbourhoods.
More than 20% of the total population in Europe is affected by this serious insecurity. In addition, the urban building stock has a significant impact on the urban environment – regeneration and reduction of land use are a priority for climate neutrality.

The right to education:

Inequalities in access to and outcomes from education are very worrying, with significant gaps between students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and those from more advantaged backgrounds.
Public schools, under attack from liberal policies, are deteriorating, while the expensive for-profit private sector, which also benefits from unjustifiably large amounts of public funding, is a booming market for the wealthy. Education should prepare citizens for the future and be free of any prejudice based on social origin, ethnicity or gender. Inequalities in access to information and communication technologies, educational resources, and appropriate learning spaces threaten the educational success and well-being of students.
Schools must be free of charge and free from the influence of private or religious interests.
We are fighting against the reproduction of sex and gender stereotypes in education. Universities and research institutes must be free from economic pressure.
We reject the Bologna Process, which promotes the privatisation of higher education by imposing extremely high tuition fees for university studies, forcing students to pay huge sums for housing or materials for their studies.
We fight for the possibility of international exchanges for students and for research, which should not be dependent on their economic capacity.

The right to health:

Health systems, including hospitals in all European countries, are suffering the adverse effects of policies to reduce public spending, and are seeing financial criteria take precedence over the quality of patient care in their management, resulting in the exhaustion of the sector’s workforce and causing a loss of purpose in their professions.
The global effort to develop and distribute vaccines has also highlighted the challenges of international cooperation and intellectual property in the health sector.
The pandemic has highlighted the problems associated with the outsourcing of our industry and the lack of public control over strategic issues such as research and the production of pharmaceuticals like medical supplies.
This is a strategy to create shortages.
The oligopoly of pharmaceutical companies has allowed them to reap enormous profits from this pandemic without being willing to provide universal access to vaccines and medicines. The biomedical research system, as indispensable as it is, is being diverted from its mission of defending the health of humanity and is being directed solely towards the centrality of maximum profit for the pharmaceutical oligopoly.

Social protection

is a major issue in Europe. Social security coverage for health, pensions and unemployment insurance significantly reduces poverty rates. All social protection systems, including pensions, are called into question by the orientations of the Member States and the orientations of the European Commission, which promotes a privatisation strategy. We reject this approach of imposing privatisation, especially of pension funds. Reforms that claim to strengthen the “financial sustainability” of social protection systems are dictated by the search for capitalist profitability and call into question social gains and citizens’ rights instead of organising a social shield.

For new economic, social, and environmental efficiency, public services must make it possible to concretise access to fundamental rights. This characteristic implies that they must be accessible to all, in all areas. Therefore, a massive investment plan is needed. It also puts into perspective the need and the role of the State as an employer.

The increasing precariousness of working conditions is mainly manifested in the process of “uberisation“, which we challenge by demanding that everyone, employers and workers, including digital platforms, enjoy equal rights and obligations. This uberisation mainly affects young people and immigrant workers.

Austerity policies and the transformation of the labour market, with the rise of self-employment and temporary contracts, have made it harder for young people to secure stable, well-paid jobs. They are more affected by educational inequalities and mental health problems, including pressures related to academic performance, economic insecurity, and exposure to social networks. We refuse to allow young people to be used to violate labour rights through unpaid internships.

Women make up most of the public service workers, especially in the social sector. This has historically allowed them to enter employment and secure contracts, but wages are very low. The precariousness of female workers is evident: more than 95% of childminders, domestic workers, home helpers, and home assistants remain women. Unpaid domestic and care work allows capitalism to reproduce generations of male workers with minimal domestic labour and maximum profit at the expense of women. Women make up 91% of care assistants, 87% of nurses, 73% of cleaners, 76% of cashiers and shop assistants, 71% of teachers… Hand in hand, patriarchy and capitalism benefit from the devaluation of women and their work. The whole organisation of our society is based on these two dominations. Women bear the majority of informal care responsibilities, making them particularly vulnerable to changes in the care sector and exposing them to increased risks of poverty and social isolation. Women are the first to suffer from the weakening of public services.

The public sector must massively recruit, be a good employer, pay properly, listen to employees on how to organise work, and not impose part-time work. Resources and funding must be sufficient to ensure that work is emancipatory and that workers no longer bear the ethical burden of a job poorly done.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a huge asset in solving increasingly complex social and environmental problems, but it can also be a danger if used by malicious actors, or if left to the capitalist market. This means establishing European sovereignty in this field and defining ethical criteria for its use. We want public control of AI, defining a set of rules to authorise the use of algorithms. Beware of the illusion of the dematerialisation of public action, which, under the guise of facilitating procedures, contributes to sideline entire sections of the population and is often designed to disguise a decline in public services.

conclusion:

For the Party of the European Left, it is a matter of urgency to combat the poverty into which the peoples of Europe are sinking. All the peoples of Europe must be guaranteed upward alignment in all areas of human rights and social protection. We want to support the creation of new public services everywhere in order to extend these areas of protection against capitalism and thus promote a new economic, social, and ecological efficiency. Public services and social protection can be valuable points of support in the process of overcoming capitalism, essential for human progress to find a way out of the systemic crisis and the challenges of the historical period we are experiencing. Public services are existing furrows to dig new paths for humanity.

[1] “Just transition means transforming the economy in a fair and inclusive way to ensure that good quality jobs are maintained and created” (IndustriALL, Just Transition Manifesto)

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