German Labour Minister Ursula von der Leyen said she’ll push to create a Europe-wide labour market with common training, mutually recognised qualifications and language classes that allow people to move to where the work is.
Von der Leyen, who is coordinating a jobs summit with labour ministers from all 27 European Union member states in Berlin on July 3, said that better mobility is key to helping match people in countries like Portugal burdened with youth unemployment of 42.5 per cent with jobs in Germany, where 34,000 training places are vacant.
“I think in terms of a European labour market and no longer national labour markets,” Von der Leyen, 54, said in an interview in Berlin yesterday. “A young Spaniard has to know where there’s a training place vacant in Germany or Austria.”
European leaders meeting in Brussels today are shifting their focus from three years of crisis fighting to longer-term efforts to tackle unemployment that has reached a record 12.2 per cent in the 17-nation euro region. By contrast, joblessness in Germany fell in June to a two-decade low of 6.8 per cent, figures released yesterday showed.
EU leaders seeking to address unemployment among under-25s that has surpassed 50 per cent in Spain and Greece plan to “front-load” €6 billion (US$7.8 billion) in aid already made available, Von der Leyen said. To that can be added €16 billion from European structural funds, yielding a total of €22 billion, she said.
Pilot Project
Even so, “it’s not just a question of money,” said Von der Leyen, citing a pilot project run by her ministry that paid for language lessons and travel costs to help young people in southern Europe find jobs and training places in Germany. To scale that up to a pan-European project, labour agencies must be involved and encouraged to become “very practical,” she said.
Representatives of all 27 EU countries’ labour agencies will attend the Berlin summit along with 20 heads of state and government including French President Francois Hollande and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, she said. The aim is to “fill the decision of the European summit with life,” she said.
Among the measures needed are Europe-wide recognition of qualifications and, longer term, common European training based on the German dual-education system, whereby apprenticeships at mainly private companies are combined with vocational education in about 350 professions. The dual-education system in particular “was the trigger that caused youth unemployment to sink in Germany 10 years ago,” she said. It is “the secret of our success right now.”
“There’s a real readiness to embrace change right now in Europe,” said Von der Leyen, who was families minister in Merkel’s first-term government and said that she’d like to serve again as labour minister after Sept. 22 elections. “The crisis can also be an opportunity that pushes us forward.”
BLOOMBERG
