I want, first of all, to welcome all the participants in this gathering promoted by the PCP under the motto "Children and Parents with rights" taking place in a well-chosen space to which Matosinhos gave the name of Álvaro Cunhal, this remarkable personality of our contemporary history and with a fine sensibility to everything referring to and involving the world of children and their well-being, well expressed in his words: "Love for children, the struggle to assure them all they need in the present and to secure their future, is an inalienable part of the progress and struggle of the communists."
Yes, it has always been like that and so it is today. On the many fronts in which we are engaged to ensure a Portugal with a future, this combat that we fight to guarantee the rights ofchildren and their parents is of particular importance in our action and intervention, because its real materialization is a condition to ensure this objective.
When we associate Portugal with a future with the idea that today's children should have their direitos safeguarded and respected, we do so because we have the view that the greatest wealth of a country, of any country, is its people.
Children are a "precious asset", and the greater the integral development we can offer them, better prospects for development and progress our country can have.
Ensuring that today's children grow up healthy, curious, knowledgeable, interventional is to ensure that the adults of the coming generation are people capable of building a country that is developed and sovereign.
That's how we look at Portugal. Investing today in the quality of life of children is to build a better future for everyone.
To ensure this there is a long way ahead and a lot of resistance to overcome, including that of the current Government of the PS and its majority, as being proved in relation to daycare centres, to ensure to children the rights they have as human beings living in the present.
The State has to ensure that all children and youth have equal conditions to grow up healthy and happy, regardless of the context in which they were born. It has responsibilities for fulfilling its tasks, in particular in promoting the right of all children to healthcare, education, social security, culture and sports. Because these are the necessary conditions to ensure equality for all children and youth.
In education we need to ensure free daycare centres. We all know that even with a low birth rate like ours, there aren't enough vacancies for all the babies that are born every year. It is necessary to build a public network of daycare centres, as revealed here by our comrade MP Diana Ferreira. We know the burden that this expenditure has for families, the difficulty of finding a vacancy, the way many families are driven into solutions they do not want, the mother forced to stop working, the resource to informal solutions, the postponement or abandonment of the decision to have another child.
It is also necessary to ensure access to preschool for all children from the age of three; the possibility of taking a nap in preschool; more support from School Social Action and extending its scope.
In terms of healthcare, they need to have ensured primary healthcare with the guarantee of a doctor and family nurse for all households with children, which is not the case. They need to have guaranteed care and follow-up by specialists in pediatrics, ophthalmology, nutrition, psychology, dental care, and this also requires strengthening the National Health Service. But the Government continues to defer the necessary measures and presents solutions that perpetuate the problems. It is preparing to reorganise obstetrics and pediatrics not to expand its capacity, but with greater concentration, leaving women and children further away from the care they need. What is needed is to combat chronic underfunding of public health services, to value its professionals, to create incentives to bind them. This is the only way to guarantee everyone's health needs, regardless of their economic and social condition.
In terms of social security, support needs to be strengthened, specially to ensure the universality of family allowances and to change their limits for children and youth.
Just as it is necessary to ensure that culture and sports are a right for all.
But responding to children's needs requires an integrated and global view of society.
Families play an irreplaceable role in children's lives. For children to have rights, parents have to have rights. Accompanying the growth ofchildren is not only the right of parents, it is the right of children.
It is not possible to talk about children's rights, without talking about wages, working time and the stability of their parents' jobs.
It is not possible to talk of these rights without looking at the family reality of the new generations of parents, determined and largely harmed by labour relations based on the exploitation of those who work, with concrete expression in job precariousness, by the deregulation of working hours, by low-paid work, low wages, wage discrimination, added to high costs of housing, transport, childcare, education or health expenditure that consume a significant share of working families' income.
It is known today, and all studies show this, that children are suffering from the unregulated schedules imposed on their parents. They spend too much time in school since the early months of life, sleep less, play less, have less time with families or outdoors.
This is a very widespread reality, of unacceptable violence, which has repercussions by denying the time needed to accompany, raise, see children grow.
This is a right of workers which cannot continue to be alienated, because it violates and denies the rights of children and youth!
Our country has a demographic deficit that is not dissociated from this reality that continues with a negative evolution. In the year that ended in 2021, Portugal lost another 20.000 inhabitants. The replacement of generations is no longer assured and continues. However, all studies confirm that most couples want to have more than one child, although most have just one. In all studies it is revealed that the economic conditions of the household appear at the top of the reasons for deciding whether to have children.
The right-wing policy of social regression and promotion of exploitation is responsible for the continued drop in the number of children who are born every year.
It is therefore necessary to break with this policy and implement the rights of workers who are parents thus guaranteeing an important parcel of the rights of children and youth.
The families must be assured their economic and social autonomy, which involves the consideration and implementation of the general increase in wages as a national emergency, including the National Minimum Wage to 850 euros – the main measure to combat child poverty. This exists, as we are well aware, because their families are poor, because their parents, even working long and many hours, still cannot guarantee enough for their children.
A national emergency, more pressing now, when everything has become even more complicated due to the rising cost of living, the reason being the speculation by the great economic interests, but also the options of the national and European right-wing policy that favour and serve them, heightening the escalation of the price increases we are witnessing.
A policy that quickly raises the scare about the dangers of rising wages which they try to hold responsible for an uncontrolled inflationary flare-up, while doing nothing, and they could, to set limits and control prices.
They who use the pretext of war and sanctions, whose consequences the people pay, while the big transnational economic groups and national big business amass millions in formidable profits.
Talking about the rights of parents and children requires combating the deregulation of working time, combating savage schedules, that put fathers and mothers of young children working shifts, at night and during the weekend, forcing their children to live at the pace of their parents’ shifts, not seeing them awake for weeks, not having a weekend together for months.
It requires reducing working hours to 35 hours, to leave time to live, so that the lives of families with children is not limited to the routine of school - work - school - bath - dinner and sleep, always in a hurry!
Children have the right to be children, to grow up healthy and happy. Fathers and mothers have the right to accompany their growth.
Talking about the rights of parents and children requires a genuine national plan to combat precariousness.
That is not what is on the horizon of the current Government, with its so-called proposal for “decent work”. In this matter what the Government of the PS aims, with the support and encouragement of PSD, Chega and IL, is to serve the interests of big capital.
In fact, the proposed Law amending the labour legislation presented by the PS government is no less than the continuation and even worsening of decency which workers must face.
A proposal that not only keeps the Labour Code's grievous norms in place but also adds new negative factors to workers. Instead of combating precariousness aiming its elimination, it tolerates and coexists with precariousness, setting measures that will not solve the current serious situation.
Talking about the rights of parents and children requires combating non-compliance with maternity and paternity rights. It requires guaranteeing these rights during pregnancy, breastfeeding, when they are sick, when there is a parent’s meeting at school. Legislation is far from being exercised in life, in companies and workplaces. It is time to make and comply, but also to expand these rights, in particular by guaranteeing maternity and paternity leave after the birth of the baby for 210 days, shared by both parents with full pay; for the mother: 180-day maternity leave, possibility of 30 days' leave before delivery and nine weeks of compulsory leave after childbirth.
Having children is obviously a life project that cannot be imposed on anyone. But it also fulfills a social function, which society must support in the same way that it must guarantee all children the conditions for them to have integral development.
But Portugal needs to have sectoral policies in other fields, such as housing, so that we truly build a Portugal with a future.
The current situation with the increase in the price of rents, incompatible with the wages and incomes of a wide range of the working population, is a strong constraint to the implementation of the rights of children and parents.
We live in a reality where there is a very short supply of public housing for rent.
It is necessary and urgent to ensure strong investment in this area, which cannot be only dependent on EU funds and needs a strong participation of the State Budget.
Yes, we need an effective public housing promotion programme in the systems of supported and conditioned rents.
Finally, children also need time. Time to play, to get enough sleep, to be with family and friends, to be outdoors.
That is why we propose the creation of a national plan for leisure-time activities, in place of the AECs – Extra Curricular Activities, so that they are not locked in school all the time, but rather to experiment, to broaden horizons, or even just play freely. There is much to be done in this area, as well as in the area of education and sports in schools and in the rehabilitation of the outdoor spaces of schools.
Yes, playing is a right and we have to guarantee it!
In the “Avante!” Festival which we are now already erecting, we also thought of children and parents, because we also want it to be a Festival for all ages. There you will find programmes for children, a space of their own, in contact with nature and conducive to gatherings. Space equipped for small children, from diaper changing room to a space for breastfeeding.
Here is our invitation to participate!
The PCP is the only political force that puts the rights of children and parents at the centre of a global response to the country's problems!
On our part we will continue this fundamental combat to ensure that all children and youth have equal conditions to grow up healthy and happy.
We will continue to present proposals and solutions, within the framework of patriotic and left-wing policy, that promote the rights of the new generations, of those who are parents or wish to be, and that promote the rights of children.
Yes, for the rights of children and their parents, we will do more than our part. Rest assured of our commitment!
