More active labour policy measures needed 

The overall goal of the European Employment Strategy - to create 'more and better jobs' - is proving no easy achievement for the European Union. Up to 2001 the labour market situation improved steadily, but since then Europe has witnessed a slowdown in economic growth, stagnating employment creation and a renewed increase in unemployment in the European Union. In the new Benchmarking Working Europe report John Monks, General Secretary of the ETUC, and Henning Jørgensen, Director of the ETUI, while drawing attention to these discouraging developments, point out that 'some European countries have also shown that it is possible to combine a highroad to welfare, growth and innovation with proactive employment policies without damaging welfare systems'.  

The ETUI/ETUC Benchmarking Working Europe 2004 monitors, for the fourth time, success and failure in the fields of employment and social policies in the European Union countries and new member states. Major conclusions reached include the following:

• Achievement of the Lisbon targets on employment rates, most particularly those for older workers, appears highly problematic for the European Union taken as a whole.
• Participation in lifelong-learning shows little overall progress in the European Union, despite the high priority attributed to this issue in most policy documents, and despite the evidence that further training measures have been shown to reduce quite significantly the risk of unemployment.
• In the absence of an improved macroeconomic dialogue, the macroeconomic context for job creation and financing of active employment policies remains poor compared to the late 1990s.

'The report provides evidence that the EU member states have not been able or willing to shift decisively away from passive towards active labour policy measures', state Henning Jørgensen and John Monks. It remains to be seen whether the employment policy of up to 2001 was just a fair-weather success or whether it can continue to create more - and better! -jobs in a more unfavourable context, and even under conditions of increasing regional labour market disparities within the enlarged European Union.  

The Benchmarking report provides detailed information on the following areas of particular relevance to the world of labour in the EU (data in graph and table form and explanatory texts):

• employment
• gender challenges of the knowledge-based society (new topic)
• working time
• social protection and social infrastructure
• collective bargaining, income distribution and poverty at work
• training participants and training firms
• information, consultation and worker participation
• European social dialogue and implementation
• macroeconomic dialogue and convergence (new topic)
• globalisation and business relocation (new topic)

Sample chapter: Employment

Table of contents