Brussels, 26/09/2012 (Agence Europe) - At the high-level conference “Step up for a stronger Europe: Civil Society: a full partner in the EUROPE 2020 Strategy,” organised in Brussels on Tuesday 25 September by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), one of the four workshops was devoted to employment policy and tackling unemployment, which provided in-depth analysis of the social repercussions of the economic crisis and ideas on how to encourage job creation, but there was a varied response to the question of how exactly public policy should be used to this effect, how much money should be earmarked for it at which level of government.
The underlying question in the debate was not, as suggested by the conference's title, the role of civil society, but rather how responsibility should be shared among the member states and the EU when it comes to job creation. EESC member Vladimira Drbalova said that the programme launched in 2010 on new skills for new jobs should be the focus of all other EU initiatives because the problems with unemployment in the EU are mainly due to problematic transition from the education system in the world of work.
This point was nuanced, but not challenged, by Francisco González de Lena, head of cabinet for the president of the Spanish Economic and Social Committee, who said that the European institutions did not have much of a role to play here. Spain itself shows that some countries have certain structural failings due to the mismatch between supply and demand on the labour market. GDP in Spain has fallen far less than the number of people in employment, because the drastic reduction in jobs since 2008 has been in low-skill jobs which do not contribute as highly to GDP. Similarly, youth unemployment has always been high in Spain, even during the economic boom, which reveals a fundamental clash between universities and what companies need.
Reacting to this, Luca Visentini, confederal secretary at the European Trade Union Confederation, said that public investment programmes at both national and European level were needed to deal with this. He asked rhetorically how industries like healthcare, green energy and new technologies were to be favoured, as desired by the Commission, if no money were put into them. A representative of BusinessEurope, Thérèse de Liedekerke, said that Member States should focus instead on reducing their sovereign debt, while Max Uebe, Head of the Youth Employment Unit at the European Commission, highlighted a different problem with investment because money itself is not the only issue, and member states have to learn how to make efficient use of investment in job creation programmes. He pointed out that there could easily be a gulf separating ideas from practical application, as has been seen in Ireland, where the Commission sent a special taskforce earlier in the year to examine youth unemployment. The Irish government has thrown a lot of money at the problem without bringing down unemployment.
The conference conclusions (including the outcome of the other three workshops) can be found at: http://www.eesc.europa.eu/?i=portal.fr.events-and-activities-stronger-europe2020-conclusions .
(JK/transl.fl)