This constitution recognises the need for social dialogue involving labour and management; it involves trade unions in the decision-making process; it has a social vision founded on social dialogue.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
This is a time for a national conversation. A conversation about the document that binds us as a nation and a people. That document, of course, is the Constitution.
Dialogue is the essence of parliamentary politics.
The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.
Our constitution is a ray of hope: H for harmony, O for Opportunity, P for people's participation and E for equality.
I think that the proposed constitution is one of the European legal documents with the strongest social dimension I have seen since I began following European issues.
To fulfill the promise of economic opportunity, we must remain true to the principle that collective bargaining is a cornerstone of a free society and indispensable to a strong middle class.
What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.
We need a stronger national voice for social workers which leads to a change in how the profession is viewed and its ability to represent itself to other professional bodies and with central government.
Essentially we need a new social consensus for economic reform as New Labour has achieved in Britain.
Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.