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IN JULY DOCKLANDS IN LONDON was the venue for an EU conference of mayors whose cities were involved in the Commission's URBAN II scheme. Designed to regenerate inner city areas and running from 2000 to 2006, the programme provides €730 million to areas inhabited by 2.2 million people. The money is part of the EU's structural funds which benefit London to the tune of €260 million (see issue 14 page 4). The conference was informed by the recently completed report into the scheme by the EU Commissioner responsible for regional policy, Michel Barnier.
The report detailed the measures taken for physical and environmental improvement, social inclusion and entrepreneurship and employment in quite small run-down areas of European cities. The targetted districts typically have unemployment and crime rates of around twice the EU average while the proportion of green space is usually about half of the figure for an average city neighbourhood. URBAN II seeks to involve local authorities and community groups and tries to keep administration as simple as possible. According to Commissioner Barnier 'Many of the most acute problems in Europe are found in its cities. Deprived of opportunity, many citizens in urban areas have lost all hope. Europe cannot stand aside from these problems which is why we have the URBAN Community Initiative'.
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Commissioner Michel Barnier presented the URBAN report to European mayors including Antonio Bassolino and Ken Livingstone | |||
During the 'Cities for Cohesion' conference Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone said 'London, like so many large European cities, suffers severe social and economic disparities between neighbourhoods with almost a quarter of most deprived wards in England, despite the city's high overall GDP. Such disparities in Europe's major urban areas are obstacles to the economic and social cohesion of the European Union'. He also presented the Commissioner with a declaration signed by 44 European mayors which called for structural funds to continue to be allocated after 2006. They are worried that once the poorer countries of eastern Europe join the EU, their cities will receive the bulk of the money.
Mayors and leaders from 250 cities attended the conference including the mayors of Genoa, Helsinki, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Vienna and the former mayor of Naples, Antonio Bassolino.
THE EU Commission has published a communication which outlines its strategy for increasing the financial stake which employees have in the companies for which they work. For the first time the Commission wants to establish benchmarks for best practice to encourage companies to offer financial participation schemes to their employees. They also lay out the principles that such schemes should be based on and set up an experts group to look at ways of reducing barriers between Member States to EU-wide schemes. The communication also stresses,particularly in the light of the ENRON scandal where workers at the bankrupt US multi-national owned shares, the importance of identifying risks. Their work on this subject began in the early eighties and two reports followed in 1991 and 1997, the second one confirming that not much progress has been made since the first. In half of the Member States financial participation schemes received no government support. Subsequently, the European Parliament adopted a Resolution calling on the Member States, the social partners and the Commission in particular to promote the exchange of information and best practice and to study the impact of financial participation schemes on employment and wage flexibility.
A Commission staff paper written last year confirmed that little progress had been made but praised the United Kingdom and France for having a long tradition of financial participation. Belgium was singled out for introducing a new law introducing tax incentives and the Netherlands and Finland for attempting to increase government support. It identified three types of participation: 1) profit sharing, where a salary bonus is tied to the profit level recorded by the company 2) share ownership and 3) share options, where a chance to buy at a reduced price is given to employees. Whichever method was used the paper affirmed that all these schemes resulted in higher productivity and were strongly helped by government tax incentives. As regards the principles of financial participation schemes the paper outlined a number of favoured ones. These include voluntarism (nobody should be forced to join as a condition of employment), availability to all employees, pre-definition of the formula linking salary bonus or share options to results, regularity of assessments, warning to employees of any financial risk and separation of normal salary and wage negotiations from the scheme. Three types of barrier to EU-wide schemes are mentioned: tax differences and social security contribution variations between Member States applying to income from financial participation and social and cultural attitudes which lead to distrust on the part of both managers and workers in some countries.
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