In a meeting with the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, the Spanish, Belgian and Hungarian labour ministers, representing the current and upcoming rotating presidencies of the EU, discussed the fundamental differences between EU social and finance ministers, as spelled out in the conclusions of the respective councils.
The 'Europe 2020' strategy should include both short and long-term measures and tackling unemployment should be an overriding objective, stressed the three labour ministers.
Wary of lifting anti-crisis measures too soon
"The economic crisis cannot be deemed to be over. We have the same number of jobs created as those destroyed by the crisis," said Spanish Labour Minister Celestino Corbacho, noting that "we are not seeing net growth of new jobs yet".
It would be wrong for Europe to let its guard down and reduce stimuli and supportive measures by the end of the year, as the Economics and Finance (ECOFIN) Council agreed to do earlier this week, said the Spanish labour minister.
EU finance ministers indeed emphasised the importance of combining cooperation on financial market regulation with "principles to underpin the coordinated withdrawal of short-term measures in labour and product markets" and called for their withdrawal by the end of 2010.
The communication gap between the finance and labour ministers seems to relate to their different approaches to economic growth.
"We need an economic growth strategy, but one that creates jobs," stressed Belgian Labour Minister Joelle Milquet.
Employment strategy not just a flagship
A weakness of the current version of Europe 2020, they said, is that it sets an ambitious employment target of putting 75% of the active population into work, but it fails to come with the economic development instruments, such as direct job creation tools.
Milquet points out that employment is just one of several flagship aspects of the Europe 2020 strategy, arguing that "it should be more than that".
Hungarian Labour Minister László Herczog explained that the European Employment Strategy, developed to encourage and coordinate joint action to create more and better jobs, cannot be reduced to the labour market issues referred to only in the 'Youth on the Move' flagship initiative of the Europe 2020 plan.
The EU employment strategy covers a broad range of labour market, employment, training and economic policies and must address them in a consistent manner, insisted the minister.
"I can't see clearly whether the European Employment Strategy will be developed beyond the approach of Europe 2020, which is essentially limited to the labour market and flexicurity. Or will the employment strategy basically include only the actions currently covered by Europe 2020?" Herczog asked.
New governance models
Labour ministers are clearly trying to secure for themselves a bigger role in the European governance architecture. They called for more coordination with their finance and economic counterparts, and proposed to hold a European employment summit by the end of the year or in early 2011.
"We have 23 million unemployed. We need a summit to deal with the problem," said Milquet.
Last year, a downgraded employment summit in Prague agreed on a 10-point plan which urged the EU 27 to swiftly step up action to increase access to employment, particularly for young people, as well as to upgrade skills, match labour-market needs and promote mobility (EurActiv 08/05/09).
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