Race to work miracles

Date: 19/02/1998

Simon Coss explains why the national employment plans currently being drawn up are unlikely to contain any surprises

THREE months ago, Europe's political leaders met in Luxembourg and promised to do their utmost to ease the plight of the EU's 18 million unemployed.

Since then, experts in the EU's 15 national capitals have been working hard to ensure that they meet the 15 April deadline for providing the European Commission with details of their 'national employment plans', which must be based on the November summit's celebrated 'Luxembourg guidelines'.

With just two months to go, governments are vying with each other to be first to produce their plans.

But the real question is whether any of them will come forward with proposals that they would not have made anyway, with or without the Luxembourg jobs summit.

Experts in the Commission's Directorate-General for social affairs (DGV), which will be charged with drawing up an initial assessment of the plans, tacitly admit that - at least in some cases - there is unlikely to be anything really new in what is proposed. "Some are drawing up quite fundamental assessments, but others are really pulling together bits and pieces," explained one expert.

Senior DGV officials are currently engaged in a whistle-stop tour of Union member states to stress the importance of the Luxembourg guidelines to national officials. "We have been doing about two or three seminars a week on this issue," said the expert.

A picture is emerging of a series of very different national plans which reflect both the distinct problems faced by individual countries and the variety of strategies adopted by governments from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Supporters of the approach agreed by EU leaders in Luxembourg argue this is not a problem, stressing that the guidelines were specifically designed to be interpreted according to differing national needs.

"The evaluation of the plans must be given in a national context, but the point is that we have to work to a common approach," said Wim Bergens of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC).

While this is generally uncontentious, real problems are likely to arise when it comes to comparing individual national plans. At the most basic level, there are currently no commonly agreed statistical methods for measuring unemployment. The Greek government, for example, refuses to supply the EU's statistical office Eurostat with a figure for the number of people out of work throughout the country, and other member states all have their own ways of calculating jobless totals.

The guidelines also sidestep several important political questions, including the crucial issue of the types of jobs to be created.

Essentially, the argument centres on whether reducing unemployment by creating low-paid posts in the service sector - the pejoratively termed 'McJobs' - is preferable to holding out for higher standards of pay and conditions and, as a result, tolerating longer dole queues.

Such arguments lie at the heart of the differences between the French and British governments' approaches to tackling unemployment. When member states' national plans are formally assessed for the first time at the June summit of EU leaders in Cardiff, both sides are likely to argue that theirs is the best solution.

At present, the UK's strategy is being hailed as the way forward by the Union's business sector. New Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair's approach of creating jobs through a flexible and deregulated jobs market is held up as the prime reason why UK unemployment now stands at just 6.6% - almost half the French level.

Indeed, at the recent meeting of world economic leaders in Davos,

Switzerland, French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn was criticised repeatedly for his government's decision to try to create jobs by introducing a 35-hour working week.

The logic behind the French plan is that hours 'saved' will be clumped together to generate new jobs. But business leaders in Davos all claimed the plan amounted to economic madness, especially at a time when France's competitors in South East Asia were talking of introducing a 70-hour week in order to 'work their way out' of the region's ongoing economic crisis.

To be fair to the French, Blair's task has been made easier because of the dirty work done for him in the 1980s by Conservative Premier Margaret Thatcher. As one wry French observer put it: "It's easy to be Socialist after Maggie."

At the moment, the 'Anglo-Saxon model' appears to be in the ascendancy as the preferred solution to the EU's jobless woes in political as well as business circles.

London has informed the Commission that it intends to present its plan by the end of the month, making it the first government to do so. "The British are taking this very seriously and they are keen to get their ideas across.

They feel one of the best ways to do this will be to get in first, as it were," explained one Commission expert.

The UK is particularly eager to sing the praises of innovations such as its Welfare to Work programme, which links the payment of unemployment benefits to a willingness to take up job or training opportunities.

On a purely cosmetic level, member states will probably be able to produce plans which are more or less in line with the Luxembourg criteria. But this has more to do with the fact that the November meeting culminated in a fairly vague document rather than signalling a new approach in national capitals.

The only concrete targets included in the guidelines were that, within five years, all school-leavers should be offered a job or training place within six months of completing their education, and that the same opportunities should be available to people who had been unemployed for more than a year.

EU governments also pledged to try to ensure that 20% of Europe's jobless were in some sort of full-time training by the same deadline.

However, there were several get-out clauses, including the option for countries with particularly severe unemployment problems such as Spain to extend the cut-off date where necessary.

There still remains the underlying problem of how to make useful comparisons between the plans so that a 'league table' of the Union's job creators can be drawn up. Here the Commission admits much work still needs to be done. "We are currently trying to agree with member states on a set of commonly agreed indicators, but this is not a key condition for Cardiff," said one official.

The institution says that no one should expect a detailed analysis of how the plans are working to emerge from this June's summit. Indeed, officials doubt whether they will be able to produce a definitive report on Europe's fight against unemployment in time for the following meeting of EU political leaders which will take place in Vienna in December this year.

"The plans are only just being approved and we will need time to see if they work. These are structural policies which cannot be implemented immediately," said one Commission expert. "I doubt if we will be able to do any proper kind of evaluation by Vienna. I don't really see any results before next year."

Major feature on the projected National Employment Plans being put together by each Member State, to be submitted to the Commission by 15.4.98.