Joint Employment Report: EPSCO Council conclusions miss the point
The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is disappointed about the conclusions on the Joint Employment Report adopted yesterday by the Employment and Social Affairs (EPSCO) Council in the context of the Annual Growth Survey 2011, as they are missing the point. Employment ministers should stop putting labour market policy at the exclusive service of narrow competitiveness goals.
Commenting the Conclusions adopted by EPSCO Council, Joël Decaillon, ETUC Deputy General Secretary said: “Europe is obsessed with wage competitiveness. Thinking of benefits as something to be switched off and on at any time will undermine the structural reliability of benefit systems and, with that, the overall security of the labour market. Designing unemployment benefit systems to ‘make work pay’ quickly boils down to blaming the unemployed for being out of a job. Instead, benefit systems should be designed to ‘make transitions pay’. Unemployment benefit systems need to provide robust security at all times, irrespective of whether the economy is going up or going down.”
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