On Monday, 19 January, the MEP Jana Toom addressed the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on the report about the Just Transition Directive. As the main rapporteur Jana Toom talked about the challenges for this report to be approved by the European Parliament. The voting will be held today.
“We can see that since the beginning of this mandate, the wind is not blowing in the sails of social policies”, Jana Toom said (video). “This is a grave mistake. We hear so many voices asking for simplification or deregulation at all costs. But for whom will the economy deliver, if not for workers and all our fellow Europeans? What is the point of cutting down on all of our laws, if it comes at the price of our prosperity? This sounds to me less like a well-thought political strategy and more like taking on the fringe ideas we see on the other side of the Atlantic.”
“I am particularly disappointed to see that even the colleagues from EPP seem to be enchanted by these radical ideas. While many of them joined us in supporting the call for Just transition Directive just three months ago, I am hearing that simplification obsession is turning the whole group against this call for a legislation that has to deliver for some of our most vulnerable regions. And that is the problem we have in this house. We have a tendency to set a big political ambition and work very hard to put it into place. And then we just move on to the next political ambition. We need to follow our ambitions in real life and make sure that we are actually achieving what we set out to do. That is exactly what we did with the Just Transition: we promised that we would leave no-one behind.”
The MEP emphasized: “We need a binding framework with a mix of measures aimed at turning into reality our promise for a socially just transition for the regions, sectors and workers that are being affected and that will be affected by the world moving away from fossil fuels.”
“We need to make sure that companies together with employees prepare for the changes ahead. We need to ensure that workers are ready for the jobs of tomorrow through a right to training. So that national authorities, companies and trade unions can organize a training system that can prepare workers to take on jobs in the clean and digital economy. And most importantly, we need to ensure that sufficient jobs are being created, because all the training in the world will not help if there isn’t a business out there looking to hire. For this, we need countries to lay out national Just Transition Plans and to focus on business support programmes aimed at revitalising the local economies of the affected regions. We face a choice between making sure that we can still ask for reasonable legislation to serve the people affected by a changing economy or putting our head in the sand for the pursuit of a radical idea of simplification that in this particular case will serve nobody.”
While giving her concluding remarks (video), Jana Toom said: “I’m coming from Estonia. We don’t have coal, but we do have oil shale, which had to be massively cut down as part of the transition. On the ground, this means not only abnormally high prices for energy, but also a rapid depopulation of the region. Over the past year alone, in 2025, Ida-Virumaa county, oil-shale region, lost almost 2% of its population. Ask these people, whether they consider transition to be just. Ask them, whether we achieve our goals and got everyone’s support for the Green Deal, as promised by the Commission. The answer is obvious: we did not manage to deliver on our promises. But every time we fail to do that, we cut off a part of European project. Colleagues, it is high time to admit our mistakes and correct them.”