Tlalocone
5 May 2005, 10:49 AM
http://www.miniszterelnok.hu/domain2/files/modules/module15/533462D85A749B3E.jpgMr Ferenc Gyurcsany:"
Let's create a world where you can work and it makes sense to work"
"Let's create a world where you can work and it makes sense to work; and it even pays to work in the white economy, telling it everyone instead of hiding because it pays to pay the public burdens on labour."
Honourable Madam Speaker, Honourable Parliament, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Theoretically, 15 years are not much in the life of a nation. However, the past 15 years have changed Hungary profoundly. They have transformed this country, at least if we look at political almanacs or history books. Much has changed of what is important for a country, or what can be seen from the country from a distance. The system of political institutions has changed, the constitution has changed, and there has been much change in the economy and our alliances. The country's position in the world has changed. We could even be satisfied.
However, there is something that has not changed, or has not changed enough. Or perhaps there has been a change for many that has not increased their satisfaction but rather their disappointment or disenchantment. The everyday lives of the people have not changed enough. Our common world as a source of peace and security has not changed, and it even seems that we must face more and more risks and challenges. So if you become a politician or a public personality, then you are - on one hand - proud of whatever this country has achieved; and you must face the question on the other hand that "okay, and what about common weekdays?"
Do we have a reason to be satisfied about how millions of people live in Hungary today? Do we have a reason to be satisfied about the common days of our children, the majority of our peers, our parents or grandparents? I can hear many saying in Hungary today: no, they are not satisfied with how things are progressing. The change of political regimes did not respond to the hopes in many aspects, especially in terms of our everyday lives. The dignity of common days has not improved, the peace and security of common days have not increased; and we cannot be assured if we think about tomorrow and the day after.
One after the other, politicians and governments tried a great variety of therapies over the past period. We had this and we had that. Hungary has been on the course of continuous economic growth for the past ten years after 1995. Our joint income has been growing by 3-4.5 percent. This could even be enough for the country to perceive that everything is all right; the world has opened up for Hungary; more and more people become part of the world which elevates them to the path of a more peaceful and more secure life instead of living penny by penny, facing everyday risks or conflicts. And if it does not work by that then we obviously have not been doing something right. If it does not work like that then I think we should consider what we can do differently. How can we provide security, peace, prosperity and opportunities for many in this country instead of just a few? Around 2000 and 2001 we launched a course of economic and social policy that was very different from everything before. We had quite much debate about this back then, but I can easily admit that we, in fact, continued with that in 2002. We continued because we said that the government should be the protagonist in providing people with more peaceful and richer common days. So we decided to increase the welfare and developmental expenditures of the government. We also did this in an unchanged structure and an unchanged institutional framework financed from taxes and through the government. We definitely saw some temporary results. In fact the country could feel the first steps of development. It started to emerge and could feel like that as long as the state was able to play this role, which was financed from the taxes of others.
If I think back to the original budget of 2002, which was part of a two-year budget, and if I look at how much we spent over the past period of time, or how much more we spent - well, it is an incredible figure. We spent HUF 8,600 billion more over the past three years than what we had planned in 2002, or if we multiply this by three for the next years. 8,600 billion forints is a completely understandable figure for parliamentary deputies, but I am not so sure that our viewers or listeners know how much it is: HUF 8,600 billion is exactly the amount we collect as VAT over four years. This is like giving the entire budget funding to all local governments in Hungary for two years in advance. Budapest, the city with the largest amount of central budget contribution, could live for more than 20 years from this amount of money, and I could go on. It would also be sufficient for all family subsidies for 20 years, which is around HUF 400 billion currently. It is a horrendous amount of money! Let's also add to this - because our friends from the opposition and perhaps others sometimes ask us where the funds are that have increased our national debt over the past period of time. Half of that, approximately HUF 4,000 billion of the HUF 8,600 billion is right here in this programme. And the other half was collected in taxes and duties: the people paid it.
Now let's ask the question whether all of this has made Hungary any richer. Are the people happier? Do they feel that things are going well while the extremely expansive role of the state tried to solve their troubles and problems between 2001 and 2003-4?
Also there have been some very important successes along the way. Although we are quarrelling about incomes and salaries, we compare the figures from last year with the figures with the year before, we can clearly see that we can buy 20 percent more on average from our incomes and pensions in the last two years than three years ago. If we look at the amounts of family support we can say that they have increased significantly. We have been listing these figures endlessly, so I do not want to continue with this practice that I criticised so often. I do not wish to become simply and easily the propaganda speaker of the successful actions of the government in the previous years. On one side we have a lot of measures implemented from the funds of the people, a lot of good deeds with perceivable effects; on the other side there are many unsatisfied requirements, many sad eyes, lots of disappointment and dissatisfied requirements, all of them existing side by side. What should we do about this?
After investigating the entire situation and, I believe, keeping in line with my speech of 14 February when I said that new politics and policies were needed, and I tried to motivate ourselves to draw the accounts of the past 15 years and to decide which direction to go, I say today that we should do what - and I can hear the words of fellow deputies from the opposition and the government ranks - we can all agree upon. Because we all agree that nothing else than work performed properly against proper pay can create progress, everyday peace, pride and dignity in a country. You in the opposition benches perhaps say that the economy of labour should be created. We agree on that. Let's create a world where you can work and it makes sense to work; and it even pays to work in the white economy, telling it everyone instead of hiding because it pays to pay the public burdens on labour. This cannot be achieved in the world of labour only. Such a new world is not simply created by employment and labour market policies. We should rather align our entire politics to this: we should certainly consider our educational policy, we should align the entire role of the state, the healthcare system should support this scheme and also social security in the wider sense and including pension insurance; our social policy should be about this, we should support and contribute to this through our developmental policy and finally let's not forget about tax and duty policies either. So that you can work and it is worthwhile to work.
There are very many obstacles to this today. I said that this country did not have a single big secret; there is not a single key that can open the road to success, there is not a single reform that is missing but rather there are many, many steps, dozens and dozens of steps. Definitely more than a hundred, we symbolically say that there are a hundred steps. There are many steps ahead so that we can create a world that is not built upon half-truths and lies, secret or even concealed work, a world that is not built on tricky Hungary. I believe that we can make it because we can see that the enlarged role of the state can solve issues for a short time but it does not transform the country and does not make it more liveable for ten million people.
Instead of a country of two million successful people we should create the country of ten or fifteen million successful Hungarians; a country where work provides everybody with the opportunity to live, and where taxes and contributions paid from work and the public burdens collected from the revenues generated by businesses allow us to fund and help those who cannot or are unable to work, or are left behind in this world. Because work, competition and solidarity exist together. A strong economy built on fair competition is able to finance a fair social policy. In the coming weeks the government of the Republic will submit a series of proposals to the Parliament and pass laws within its own jurisdiction in order to move us towards such a world. These proposals will concern the employment policy, the healthcare system, the pension system, education, certain parts of vocational training, they will concern the tax and contributions policy, the sector of local governments, the co-operation of the state, local governments and non-governmental organisations, and they will practically involve all important elements of governance and the operation of the state.
Where else could we start than with employment policy and labour affairs? There is a series of measures that we must pass in the next period of time to make it worthwhile to work, and to allow people to work. So I propose first to pull down the barriers that were erected by the state itself. The barriers that hinder work in the very areas where the state is present with its social role: the support of the unemployed, the support of families and children. Today if somebody receives any of these subsidy forms and starts to work at the same time, they will run into bans and prohibitions. The state says that they are not allowed to. This is the world we built in the past 15 years. It is wrong. Let's say that this rigid wall between the world of labour and social care should be demolished. We should make it much more flexible and permeable, there should be degrees of transition and nobody should face the situation that if they want to work they must keep it a secret - this is how it is today with social subsidies - or they should say that they will not work, or work in the black economy, or they are expected to waive social subsidy.
Second I propose that the unemployment benefit with registration and payments should be transformed into job seeking subsidy. A person loosing their work do not need just a subsidy but they need active support especially in the first three months so that they can go back to work and find a new job as soon as possible. This means that we should give much more service in the first three months when there are more possibilities to do so. The employment service and the person looking for a job should sit together and discuss what needs to be done this week or the next. What does the service and what does the person do? Where will they submit bids? Where do they have to submit bids? Who should be called? Where to go for job interviews, how to get to the next town? We should even give more money for that. We should give more money in the first three months because - I don't know if fellow deputies know this - the amount of subsidy is just slightly more than HUF 40 thousand today. There should be a closer relationship between the former pay and the benefits paid for the first three months instead of what we have today. And if we can succeed with finding a new job in the first three months, then we can perhaps escape the trap that is gaping for those who have been unable to find a job for three, six or nine months.
Third: There is a lot of work around the house today that traditionally belongs to the world of black labour. Minor repairs, hauling wood for the oven inside, pruning the trees, setting up the garden, looking after the kids or helping them with their homework, or helping out with cleaning. Everybody knows that this work is done illegally today. These workers don't pay contributions and don't acquire any rights either. There are thousands and tens of thousands of them in the country. Let's call work of public interest with public burdens blue labour from now on. Let's make the whole thing simple and transparent and let's motivate the employee and the employer to make it white. That can restore the dignity of tens of thousands of people. They will no longer work black, they will do something useful, and when they go home and say that they were to work that will no longer mean that they were to hidden, illegal work but rather to a proper job with insurance today and healthcare and pension services later. It is only reasonable. It is also reasonable to pay back the majority of the public burdens collected as taxes this way. So that the employer is also interested and can take pride in giving a job to a person and helping someone so that they can live how they always wanted to live.
And I say that we should go on. We can clearly see that there are areas in our lives like agriculture where seasonal work is unreasonably overregulated and unjustifiably limited, while there is a huge demand for employment possibilities with easy regulations, little administration, small burdens and in a legal framework especially at seasonal works. Why do we regulate and limit this opportunity? You are right, we should not talk about this but rather change the rules; and we should do this today and not next year. We should not wait another year or two years. We should not carry on the heritage of the past 15 years in this field.
There are many, many jobs where the norm applied for performance based pay serves the single purpose of paying less than the minimum wage. This is not right. This practice leaves the employee exposed. We should stand up and protect the right of the employee. We should say that no norm can be set in a way that a worker of average training and average practice with the work processes is unable to deliver. If such practice is used then it is called fraud, and we should use the transformation of the entire labour control system to achieve that not just papers are controlled but rather the true processes behind the documents. And if someone still says that they want to employ grey and black labour, then we must apply bigger, stronger and more unambiguous sanctions. We should not even shy away from the threat of the criminal law. Because anyone bereaving the employees of their insurance and their possibility to acquire rights, anyone not making a contribution to our joint budget and funds will deteriorate the competitive position of everybody else and demolish the credibility, integrity and dignity of the whole of Hungary while they abuse their supremacy. This is why employers and entrepreneurs must act with greater responsibility.
We can go even further with the reform of the rules of public benefit work that we spend more than HUF 30 billion on. We can make it more interesting that this system is coupled with real work and we can also move towards creating a vocational training and education system that is steered more by the labour market instead of the educational market.
Let's move on with this; let's perform great deeds for a successful country, for a proud Hungary. Let's get to work: we say this this week, we carry it through, and we carry on unshaken.
Thank you very much. " Ferenc Gyurcsany(Head of the politica part called MSZP)http://www.miniszterelnok.hu/domain2/files/modules/module15/53905841A1398C22.jpg (http://javascript<b></b>:self.close())
Let's create a world where you can work and it makes sense to work"
"Let's create a world where you can work and it makes sense to work; and it even pays to work in the white economy, telling it everyone instead of hiding because it pays to pay the public burdens on labour."
Honourable Madam Speaker, Honourable Parliament, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Theoretically, 15 years are not much in the life of a nation. However, the past 15 years have changed Hungary profoundly. They have transformed this country, at least if we look at political almanacs or history books. Much has changed of what is important for a country, or what can be seen from the country from a distance. The system of political institutions has changed, the constitution has changed, and there has been much change in the economy and our alliances. The country's position in the world has changed. We could even be satisfied.
However, there is something that has not changed, or has not changed enough. Or perhaps there has been a change for many that has not increased their satisfaction but rather their disappointment or disenchantment. The everyday lives of the people have not changed enough. Our common world as a source of peace and security has not changed, and it even seems that we must face more and more risks and challenges. So if you become a politician or a public personality, then you are - on one hand - proud of whatever this country has achieved; and you must face the question on the other hand that "okay, and what about common weekdays?"
Do we have a reason to be satisfied about how millions of people live in Hungary today? Do we have a reason to be satisfied about the common days of our children, the majority of our peers, our parents or grandparents? I can hear many saying in Hungary today: no, they are not satisfied with how things are progressing. The change of political regimes did not respond to the hopes in many aspects, especially in terms of our everyday lives. The dignity of common days has not improved, the peace and security of common days have not increased; and we cannot be assured if we think about tomorrow and the day after.
One after the other, politicians and governments tried a great variety of therapies over the past period. We had this and we had that. Hungary has been on the course of continuous economic growth for the past ten years after 1995. Our joint income has been growing by 3-4.5 percent. This could even be enough for the country to perceive that everything is all right; the world has opened up for Hungary; more and more people become part of the world which elevates them to the path of a more peaceful and more secure life instead of living penny by penny, facing everyday risks or conflicts. And if it does not work by that then we obviously have not been doing something right. If it does not work like that then I think we should consider what we can do differently. How can we provide security, peace, prosperity and opportunities for many in this country instead of just a few? Around 2000 and 2001 we launched a course of economic and social policy that was very different from everything before. We had quite much debate about this back then, but I can easily admit that we, in fact, continued with that in 2002. We continued because we said that the government should be the protagonist in providing people with more peaceful and richer common days. So we decided to increase the welfare and developmental expenditures of the government. We also did this in an unchanged structure and an unchanged institutional framework financed from taxes and through the government. We definitely saw some temporary results. In fact the country could feel the first steps of development. It started to emerge and could feel like that as long as the state was able to play this role, which was financed from the taxes of others.
If I think back to the original budget of 2002, which was part of a two-year budget, and if I look at how much we spent over the past period of time, or how much more we spent - well, it is an incredible figure. We spent HUF 8,600 billion more over the past three years than what we had planned in 2002, or if we multiply this by three for the next years. 8,600 billion forints is a completely understandable figure for parliamentary deputies, but I am not so sure that our viewers or listeners know how much it is: HUF 8,600 billion is exactly the amount we collect as VAT over four years. This is like giving the entire budget funding to all local governments in Hungary for two years in advance. Budapest, the city with the largest amount of central budget contribution, could live for more than 20 years from this amount of money, and I could go on. It would also be sufficient for all family subsidies for 20 years, which is around HUF 400 billion currently. It is a horrendous amount of money! Let's also add to this - because our friends from the opposition and perhaps others sometimes ask us where the funds are that have increased our national debt over the past period of time. Half of that, approximately HUF 4,000 billion of the HUF 8,600 billion is right here in this programme. And the other half was collected in taxes and duties: the people paid it.
Now let's ask the question whether all of this has made Hungary any richer. Are the people happier? Do they feel that things are going well while the extremely expansive role of the state tried to solve their troubles and problems between 2001 and 2003-4?
Also there have been some very important successes along the way. Although we are quarrelling about incomes and salaries, we compare the figures from last year with the figures with the year before, we can clearly see that we can buy 20 percent more on average from our incomes and pensions in the last two years than three years ago. If we look at the amounts of family support we can say that they have increased significantly. We have been listing these figures endlessly, so I do not want to continue with this practice that I criticised so often. I do not wish to become simply and easily the propaganda speaker of the successful actions of the government in the previous years. On one side we have a lot of measures implemented from the funds of the people, a lot of good deeds with perceivable effects; on the other side there are many unsatisfied requirements, many sad eyes, lots of disappointment and dissatisfied requirements, all of them existing side by side. What should we do about this?
After investigating the entire situation and, I believe, keeping in line with my speech of 14 February when I said that new politics and policies were needed, and I tried to motivate ourselves to draw the accounts of the past 15 years and to decide which direction to go, I say today that we should do what - and I can hear the words of fellow deputies from the opposition and the government ranks - we can all agree upon. Because we all agree that nothing else than work performed properly against proper pay can create progress, everyday peace, pride and dignity in a country. You in the opposition benches perhaps say that the economy of labour should be created. We agree on that. Let's create a world where you can work and it makes sense to work; and it even pays to work in the white economy, telling it everyone instead of hiding because it pays to pay the public burdens on labour. This cannot be achieved in the world of labour only. Such a new world is not simply created by employment and labour market policies. We should rather align our entire politics to this: we should certainly consider our educational policy, we should align the entire role of the state, the healthcare system should support this scheme and also social security in the wider sense and including pension insurance; our social policy should be about this, we should support and contribute to this through our developmental policy and finally let's not forget about tax and duty policies either. So that you can work and it is worthwhile to work.
There are very many obstacles to this today. I said that this country did not have a single big secret; there is not a single key that can open the road to success, there is not a single reform that is missing but rather there are many, many steps, dozens and dozens of steps. Definitely more than a hundred, we symbolically say that there are a hundred steps. There are many steps ahead so that we can create a world that is not built upon half-truths and lies, secret or even concealed work, a world that is not built on tricky Hungary. I believe that we can make it because we can see that the enlarged role of the state can solve issues for a short time but it does not transform the country and does not make it more liveable for ten million people.
Instead of a country of two million successful people we should create the country of ten or fifteen million successful Hungarians; a country where work provides everybody with the opportunity to live, and where taxes and contributions paid from work and the public burdens collected from the revenues generated by businesses allow us to fund and help those who cannot or are unable to work, or are left behind in this world. Because work, competition and solidarity exist together. A strong economy built on fair competition is able to finance a fair social policy. In the coming weeks the government of the Republic will submit a series of proposals to the Parliament and pass laws within its own jurisdiction in order to move us towards such a world. These proposals will concern the employment policy, the healthcare system, the pension system, education, certain parts of vocational training, they will concern the tax and contributions policy, the sector of local governments, the co-operation of the state, local governments and non-governmental organisations, and they will practically involve all important elements of governance and the operation of the state.
Where else could we start than with employment policy and labour affairs? There is a series of measures that we must pass in the next period of time to make it worthwhile to work, and to allow people to work. So I propose first to pull down the barriers that were erected by the state itself. The barriers that hinder work in the very areas where the state is present with its social role: the support of the unemployed, the support of families and children. Today if somebody receives any of these subsidy forms and starts to work at the same time, they will run into bans and prohibitions. The state says that they are not allowed to. This is the world we built in the past 15 years. It is wrong. Let's say that this rigid wall between the world of labour and social care should be demolished. We should make it much more flexible and permeable, there should be degrees of transition and nobody should face the situation that if they want to work they must keep it a secret - this is how it is today with social subsidies - or they should say that they will not work, or work in the black economy, or they are expected to waive social subsidy.
Second I propose that the unemployment benefit with registration and payments should be transformed into job seeking subsidy. A person loosing their work do not need just a subsidy but they need active support especially in the first three months so that they can go back to work and find a new job as soon as possible. This means that we should give much more service in the first three months when there are more possibilities to do so. The employment service and the person looking for a job should sit together and discuss what needs to be done this week or the next. What does the service and what does the person do? Where will they submit bids? Where do they have to submit bids? Who should be called? Where to go for job interviews, how to get to the next town? We should even give more money for that. We should give more money in the first three months because - I don't know if fellow deputies know this - the amount of subsidy is just slightly more than HUF 40 thousand today. There should be a closer relationship between the former pay and the benefits paid for the first three months instead of what we have today. And if we can succeed with finding a new job in the first three months, then we can perhaps escape the trap that is gaping for those who have been unable to find a job for three, six or nine months.
Third: There is a lot of work around the house today that traditionally belongs to the world of black labour. Minor repairs, hauling wood for the oven inside, pruning the trees, setting up the garden, looking after the kids or helping them with their homework, or helping out with cleaning. Everybody knows that this work is done illegally today. These workers don't pay contributions and don't acquire any rights either. There are thousands and tens of thousands of them in the country. Let's call work of public interest with public burdens blue labour from now on. Let's make the whole thing simple and transparent and let's motivate the employee and the employer to make it white. That can restore the dignity of tens of thousands of people. They will no longer work black, they will do something useful, and when they go home and say that they were to work that will no longer mean that they were to hidden, illegal work but rather to a proper job with insurance today and healthcare and pension services later. It is only reasonable. It is also reasonable to pay back the majority of the public burdens collected as taxes this way. So that the employer is also interested and can take pride in giving a job to a person and helping someone so that they can live how they always wanted to live.
And I say that we should go on. We can clearly see that there are areas in our lives like agriculture where seasonal work is unreasonably overregulated and unjustifiably limited, while there is a huge demand for employment possibilities with easy regulations, little administration, small burdens and in a legal framework especially at seasonal works. Why do we regulate and limit this opportunity? You are right, we should not talk about this but rather change the rules; and we should do this today and not next year. We should not wait another year or two years. We should not carry on the heritage of the past 15 years in this field.
There are many, many jobs where the norm applied for performance based pay serves the single purpose of paying less than the minimum wage. This is not right. This practice leaves the employee exposed. We should stand up and protect the right of the employee. We should say that no norm can be set in a way that a worker of average training and average practice with the work processes is unable to deliver. If such practice is used then it is called fraud, and we should use the transformation of the entire labour control system to achieve that not just papers are controlled but rather the true processes behind the documents. And if someone still says that they want to employ grey and black labour, then we must apply bigger, stronger and more unambiguous sanctions. We should not even shy away from the threat of the criminal law. Because anyone bereaving the employees of their insurance and their possibility to acquire rights, anyone not making a contribution to our joint budget and funds will deteriorate the competitive position of everybody else and demolish the credibility, integrity and dignity of the whole of Hungary while they abuse their supremacy. This is why employers and entrepreneurs must act with greater responsibility.
We can go even further with the reform of the rules of public benefit work that we spend more than HUF 30 billion on. We can make it more interesting that this system is coupled with real work and we can also move towards creating a vocational training and education system that is steered more by the labour market instead of the educational market.
Let's move on with this; let's perform great deeds for a successful country, for a proud Hungary. Let's get to work: we say this this week, we carry it through, and we carry on unshaken.
Thank you very much. " Ferenc Gyurcsany(Head of the politica part called MSZP)http://www.miniszterelnok.hu/domain2/files/modules/module15/53905841A1398C22.jpg (http://javascript<b></b>:self.close())