On Monday 10 March in Brussels, at a debate on the ‘2025 Recommendation on the economic policy of the euro area’, the Ministers for Employment and Social Affairs of the EU Member States stressed the need to improve the position of under-represented groups on the labour market, to strengthen learning opportunities and to improve labour productivity.
This was based on the recommendations of the Employment and Social Protection Committees and the approved Joint Employment Report 2024.
According to the Polish minister, Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk, the labour market was still strong in 2024, but still with “a large number of under-represented groups”.
She pointed out that the Polish Presidency of the Council of the EU had emphasised, in this recommendation, the possibilities for retraining and continuing education, the risk of poverty and health and safety at work.
For its part, the Employment Committee explained on 10 March that while the resilience of the European labour market had reached record levels in 2023, “these positive figures have not been accompanied by real productivity and growth strong enough to create jobs”. The committee also highlighted the problem of insufficiently high salaries and asked Member States to assess the impact of their policies more regularly.
The Social Protection Committee has highlighted the continuing high risk of in-work poverty and the increase in energy poverty in the EU since 2021. The committee called for social protection to be modernised and for everyone to have access to all social services.
Employment report. The EU employment rate reached 75.3% in 2023, which is only 2.7 percentage points away from the target of 78% set for 2030.
But when it comes to skills, there has been only limited progress in the rate of adult participation in learning in the EU, rising from 37.4% in 2016 to 39.5% in 2022, which is still a long way from the EU's overall target of 60%.
The number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU has been reduced by around 1.6 million in 2023 compared to 2019, but this is still “far from the EU's overall target of a reduction of at least 15 million by 2030”. In almost half the Member States, the number of people at risk has increased, which runs counter to the ambitions set out in the national targets.
Labour market trends have also deteriorated recently (unemployment and long-term unemployment rates), as has labour productivity growth in the EU. While the rate of growth in labour productivity averaged around 1.4% a year before 2007, it slowed to 0.8% between 2010 and 2019, and then to 0.7% in 2023. It therefore remains structurally weak and risks compromising the EU's competitiveness.
Links to the 2025 recommendation and the joint report on employment: https://aeur.eu/f/fuh; https://aeur.eu/f/fto (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)