Flexibility and social security key to employment, experts agree

Employment Commissioner Vladimir Špidla  stressed that each country's economy has its particularities, and that solutions which may have worked for one country are not always transferable to another: "[...] There is no confrontation between national 'models'. No country just works according to one 'model'. I prefer to speak of 'social systems', which have their own coherence, and which include social security, labour market and 'governance'. 

"Some seem to be better in tune with our times challenges and demands than others: Such was the case with Italy and France in the sixties, with Germany in the seventies and eighties, and with the Dutch 'Polder' model in the nineties, and today it is the case with the models of Denmark, Finland and Austria." 

"The Nordic 'flexicurity', which has quickly become 'this month's special offer' in the supermarket of ideas, is first of all this overall coherence between social security systems, the respective roles played by the government and the social parties, between employment policy and the workings of the labour market."

Mr. Špidla used the example of the Finnish success story to illustrate that monocausal interpretations often do not work: "Remember that Nokia used to be a corporate group with activities in the rubber industries, in forestries and in cable manufacturing. It has become one of the world leaders in information technologies. That means that flexicurity is just one element of these shifts affecting economies. It cannot be understood without looking at the phenomenon as a whole."

Poul Nyrup Rasmussen is now president of the European Socialists and an MEP. A policy along the lines of flexicurity is, according to Mr. Rasmussen, best adapted to the global age, where due to ongoing structural changes jobs do not exist long enough to keep people employed for a lifetime. The answer would be, Mr. Rasmussen said, "to equip people to adapt to constant change", which should include lifelong learning, an active labour market policy involving an obligation as well as a right to training, and high, tax-financed unemployment benefits to help people bridge prolonged breaks between jobs. Such an approach, he said, has been the key to economic growth in Denmark. 

Mr. Rasmussen dismissed the finance and employment programme of Germany's conservative contender to the chancellorship, Angela Merkel. The German conservative opposition's vision, which is based on a rise in consumer taxes such as VAT and flirts with the idea of a flat tax while cutting and setting time limits on unemployment benefits would, according to Mr. Rasmussen, have adverse effects. "After the Schröder reforms, this would be a step back from the global to the industrial age with its rigid employment structures and little flexibility."