Brussels, 22/09/2005 (Agence Europe) - Last week, the American IT group, Hewlett-Packard, announced its decision to do away with some 6,000 jobs by 2008 in Europe, including 1,240 in France. Reacting to this decision, President Chirac called on his government to refer the matter to the European Commission (see EUROPE 9032 for President Barroso's reaction).
Acknowledging that massive job losses would have a destabilising effect, the Commissioner for Social Policy, Vladimir Spidla, was of the view that policies aimed at anticipating change should be implemented as a matter of urgency to respond to such situations in the most effective way. “The Commission wants to recall the importance of abiding by the European and national rules in case of mass-redundancies, especially with regards to information and consultation of workers' representatives. As always the Social Dialogue is the crucial instrument to ease the situation for the workers as much as possible”, Mr Spidla said in a press release, recalling that “it is not in the competence of the Commission to prevent Hewlett-Packard from dismissing workers”. Like José Manuel Barroso, Vladimir Spidla said that, to help dismissed workers to adapt to change, one can call on the EU Structural Funds and on the European Social Fund '( ESF) in this specific case. The Commission is therefore currently examining how to use these Funds “in close cooperation with the national and regional authorities” to alleviate the social consequences of large scale redundancies. Mr Spidla, like Mr Barraso, points out that, in its proposal for the financial perspectives 2007-2013, the Commission suggested the creation of a Growth Adjustment Fund with a budget of one billion euros annually, but that the Member States had not supported the idea. The Hewlett-Packard case proves that this was a valid proposal, Mr Spidla says. The tricky question that is now raised in this affair is that of knowing whether, or not, Hewlett-Packard received money from the EU as the type of regulation to be applied depends on this response. The Restructuring Task Force recently created will be convened to discuss the Hewlett-Packard case, Mr Spidla says.