ICT comes to aid of unemployed Portuguese textile workers

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are key to reverting the negative effects of globalisation on the job market. They were behind a successful project launched two years ago to help the suffering textile sector in Portugal and have been renewed and extended to other industries.

Over 1,700 unemployed textile workers were offered intensive courses to get ICT skills. The original target was to readmit at least 10% of the trained people to the job market by 2009. Approaching the end of the three-year project, the organisers can hail a readmission rate of 40%.

The success of the project, called TII (Technology, Innovation and Initiative), attracted the European Commission’s positive appraisal. Social Affairs Commissioner Vladimir Spidla branded it a “model” in the field of the promotion of employability, one of the top targets set by the European Union, whose Lisbon Agenda aims to make the EU the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world (see our Links Dossier).

The key to the remarkable achievements of the project is an effective public-private partnership (also known as a PPP). The American IT giant Microsoft decided to invest in training low-skilled people with close-to-zero knowledge of informatics. CITEVE, a private centre specialised in hi-tech textiles and clothing, boosting a network of 600 textile companies in Portugal, contributed to the project by identifying the most affected firms and by offering training facilities. IEFP (Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional), the Portuguese public centre for employment and professional training, helped in finding organisations interested in hiring the newly trained people.

The training sessions were tailored to the needs of the workers and gave them IT skills useful for finding jobs in the evolving textile industry, increasingly steered towards high-tech and high-quality production to shun low-cost competition from emerging countries, in particular China.

Moreover, the education received enabled unemployed workers to reshape their professional profiles to find jobs in other industrial sectors. Indeed, many re-trained people were employed in telecommunications companies, including in call centres.

The downside is that many new jobs are temporary and lower paid than the lost ones. “It is good to get a permanent job. But a temporary work is certainly better than nothing and increases the chances of finding another better job,” opined Commissioner Spidla, speaking to EURACTIV on the margins of a conference organised last Friday at CITEVE headquarters near Porto to mark the achievements of the TII program.

On the other hand, the good results of the project convinced organisers to launch a second initiative targeting other suffering industrial sectors in Portugal. By July 2009 Microsoft and CITEVE are aiming to have trained another 1,500 people who lost their jobs in the cork industry, the glass and ceramics sectors and in metallurgy and metallomechanics. Commissioner Spidla did not exclude using the EU Globalisation Fund for the extended project, which was not considered for the first phase because it did not exist then (see EURACTIV 02/02/06).

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