Getting Europe back to work proves to be hard graft for policymakers

Date: 15/04/1999

By Simon Coss

DESPITE the fact that around one in ten Europeans has been out of work at any given moment during the past decade, the European Commission still insists that the 1997 special EU jobs summit was a worthwhile exercise.

” A new agenda was established at the talks which put employment at the centre of EU policy-making,” explains a senior advisor to Acting Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn.

The Commission argues that the jobs summit, which took place in Luxembourg in November 1997 under the feisty chairmanship of Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, marked the culmination of a process which began with the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty's famous social chapter, which came into force in 1993.

The next step on the road to Luxembourg came with the inclusion of a full 'employment chapter' in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty. Once Amsterdam enters into force at the beginning of next month, all EU member states will be obliged to coordinate their national job creation efforts as far as possible.

In reality there will not be any overnight change in current practice, as governments agreed at Luxembourg that they would aim to respect the terms of the Amsterdam employment chapter immediately.

The main element of the Luxembourg deal was an EU job creation strategy based on four 'pillars': employability, entrepreneurship, adaptability and equal opportunities.

The aim of this approach is to break established and outdated patterns of employment based on the principles that people will have a job 'for life', and that men should be the main breadwinners in society.

The prime goal of the first three pillars is to create a more flexible labour force, made up of people able to adapt to new working methods and technological advances, and so take advantage of job opportunities when they arise.

” Despite the levels of unemployment in the Union, there are currently around half a million vacancies in the information technology sector because firms cannot find staff with the right qualifications,” says one Commission official, explaining the logic behind the new approach.

At Luxembourg, EU leaders also pledged to draw up annual job creation plans showing how they intended to put the Union's job creation strategy into practice at national level.

They were, however, given a large amount of leeway to decide how they adapted the Union guidelines to their particular domestic needs - a situation which prompted some critics to argue that it would be well-nigh impossible to make any useful comparisons between the different schemes.

The initial national job plans were presented to the Commission last May and the institution subsequently drew up two reports on the schemes. The first, which was presented to EU leaders the following month at their meeting in Cardiff, was simply a synthesis of the 15 national initiatives and contained no detailed analysis of the proposed job creation strategies. The second report, prepared for the December 1998 Vienna summit, was more in-depth.

In general, the Commission was fairly complimentary about most governments' efforts, although it argued that many member states had not done enough when it came to the equal opportunities pillar of the Luxembourg deal. But while these first indications would seem to be broadly positive, the Commission warns that it will take at least another year to determine whether the system is really working or not.

Trade unions and employers' organisations have given a guarded 'thumbs up' to the initial successes of the Luxembourg process, although both argue that further adjustments are needed to the scheme.

EU employers' federation UNICE insists that not enough is being done to reduce non-wage labour costs, such as social security payments and pension contributions.

” The implementation is not really in place yet. Governments need to give life to what has already been agreed,” says the organisation's social affairs director Thérèse de Liedekerke.

The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has a different complaint. It argues that the job-creation strategy will only really be effective when Europe begins planning its social and economic policies in a coordinated manner.

” You can decide what you want on social policy, but if the financial people are not involved, you get nowhere,” insists ETUC spokesman Wim Bergans.