Santer outlines jobs challenge

Date: 02/10/1997

UP TO 12 million new jobs could be created within five years if national governments agreed to follow a series of guidelines proposed by the European Commission, President Jacques Santer said this week.

Santer was speaking to the European Parliament yesterday (1 October) following the Commission's adoption of a package of ideas for generating employment.

Santer said the proposed measures could lead to a reduction in the overall EU unemployment rate from the current 10.6&percent; to 7&percent; over a five-year period.

At present, 18 million Europeans are without work. “We are proposing concrete ideas. They are certainly ambitious but they are realistic,” he told MEPs.

The 'employment guidelines', drawn up by Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn and his staff in the Commission's Directorate-General for social affairs (DGV), set out some of the practical measures the Commission believes are necessary to get Europe back to work.

It says governments must encourage entrepreneurship by making it easier for new businesses to gain access to venture capital, and insists national taxation systems need a radical overhaul in order to shift the burden of payment from labour to capital.

Other measures proposed include guaranteeing a training place or job to all young people within six months of leaving school and offering this sort of 'new start' to the long-term unemployed within a year.

The guidelines were adopted along with two other reports to form the full 'employment package'.

While the first is simply the Commission's annual review of the employment situation in the 15 EU member states, the second is more significant.

It is a draft version of the so-called joint report which finance and social affairs ministers, along with the Commission, will present to this November's special EU jobs summit.

The current text, which has yet to be approved by ministers, is openly critical of member states' current job creation strategies, attacking “the insufficient integration between policy measures and the absence, in many cases, of any clear long-term strategy or well-defined policy goals.”