Brussels, 01/06/2001 (Agence Europe) - With its adoption on Thursday of the report by José Ribeiro (UEN, P) on the European Commission's evaluation for the year 2000 of the European employment service (EURES), the European Parliament highlighted the key role played by this network in terms of the European strategy for employment. EURES is meant to help people find jobs in another EU Member State through the assistance of "Euro-counselors", partner organizations and free access to the Internet network.
MEPs requested: - a broader legal base for EURES so as to extend its areas of competence; - more detailed statistics in future reports on EURES (on cross-border mobility and the duration of contracts for jobs offered through the network) to enable a better assessment of its successes and failures; - study of the possibility of expanding access to EURES for both job requests and job offers; - organization of a hearing with the "Euro-counselors" to define more precisely the weaknesses of the system; - a special effort for the very remote regions.
During debate, after emphasizing the importance of cross-border cooperation in workforce mobility, rapporteur José Ribeiro e Castro stigmatized certain other shortcomings of EURES. The general public knows virtually nothing about the network, he claimed, and employers' organizations make very little use of it. Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou noted that the system is making progress in terms of job offers (from 43,000 at the beginning of 1998 to 166,000 at the start of 2000) and users (40% increase in 1998/99 over 1996/97) and that cooperation between the public structures that have joined the network is increasing. She added that an instrument has been set in place to enable applicants to submit their CVs when they are qualified in sectors where there is a shortage of manpower.