Brussels, 20/06/2001 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the European Commission adopted a plan aimed at improving the quality of employment and the standard of living in the Union. This new strategy aims to establish benchmarks for governments, social partners and NGOs on the basis of "quality indicators" for individual jobs, labour markets and social policies.
Presented by Anna Diamantopoulou, European Commission for Employment and Social Affairs, the plan invites Member States to create an environment for better-paid, better-skilled safer and healthier jobs, as well as better access to jobs and better social provision. As agreed by the Fifteen during the European Council of Lisbon and in the Social Agenda approved in Nice, these aims should be reached by following best practice and by making long term investment in human resource capital. For governments, this means giving preference to investment rather than to passive social transfers. The plan proposes periodic "quality reviews" in order to ensure that the social and employment policies of Member States are in line with the standards of countries that obtain the best results.
The plan is based on the use of two large groups of indicators (a certain number of which are subjective indicators) aimed at measuring the "quality" of jobs: 1) job characteristics: job satisfaction, remuneration, non-pay rewards, working time, skills and training prospects, job content, correspondence between job characteristics and employee characteristics; 2) work environment/labour market characteristics: gender equality, health and safety at work, flexibility and security of employment, access to jobs, work/life balance, social dialogue and worker involvement, diversity (older employees, the disabled …) and non-discrimination. These indicators, which come in addition to the many quantitative indicators already existing, will support the initiatives already under way such as annual coordination of employment policies. They should be approved during the European Summit of Laeken in December. We recall that the quality of jobs is among the priorities of the Belgian EU Presidency.