2.12.2011   

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

CE 351/29

A.

whereas the economic crisis has caused a massive rise in unemployment rates in the EU Member States; whereas young people have been disproportionately affected by this trend; whereas the rate of youth unemployment is rising more sharply in relation to the average unemployment rate; whereas more than 5,5 million young people in the EU under 25 were unemployed in December 2009, equivalent to 21,4 % of all young people, creating the paradox that while young people, owing to the ageing of the population, constitute a cornerstone of the social security systems, at the same time they remain on the economic margin,

B.

whereas there are few possibilities for young people to find permanent regular employment; whereas young people mainly enter the labour market via atypical, highly flexible, insecure and precarious forms of employment (marginal part-time, temporary or fixed term employment etc.), and the likelihood that this is a stepping stone to permanent employment is low,

C.

whereas employers seem to be using traineeships and internships more frequently to replace regular employment, thereby exploiting the obstacles to entering the labour market faced by young people; whereas such forms of exploitation of young people need to be addressed and effectively eradicated by Member States,

D.

whereas four out of the ten measures adopted at the Prague 2009 extraordinary EU summit on employment bear on education, vocational training, lifelong learning, apprenticeships, facilitating mobility, and better forecasting of labour market needs and the matching skills,

E.

whereas youth unemployment and underemployment impose heavy social and economic costs on society, resulting in the loss of opportunities for economic growth, erosion of the tax base which undermines investment in infrastructure and public services, increased welfare costs, underutilised investment in education and training, and the risk of long-term unemployment and social exclusion,

F.

whereas younger generations will have to reduce the gigantic public debt caused by the present generation,

G.

whereas economic and demographic projections point out that 80 million job opportunities will arise in the EU in the next decade, the majority of which will require a high skilled workforce; whereas the employment rate for people with high skill levels across the EU as a whole is approximately 85 %, for medium skill levels 70 % and for low skill levels 50 %,

H.

whereas economic growth is crucial for job creation, as more economic growth brings more employment possibilities; whereas more than 50 % of new jobs in Europe are created by SMEs,

I.

whereas the transition from education to work and between jobs is a structural challenge for young people all over the EU; whereas apprenticeships have a largely positive impact on young people’s access to employment, especially if they enable the direct in-house acquisition of work skills and expertise,

J.

whereas education programmes should be improved significantly, while university-business partnerships, efficient apprenticeship schemes, career development loans and investment in training by employers should be encouraged,

K.

whereas young people often face discrimination on the grounds of their age when entering the labour market and when jobs are being cut back; whereas young women are more likely to face unemployment and poverty or to be engaged in casual or undeclared employment than young men; whereas on the other hand young men have been hit hardest by unemployment during the current economic crisis; whereas disabled young people face even greater obstacles to their integration into the labour market,

L.

whereas decent work shifts young people from social dependence to self sufficiency, helps them escape poverty and enables them to make an active contribution to society, both economically and socially; whereas legislation in some Member States introduces age discrimination through restrictions to young people’s rights that are solely based on age, such as the lower minimum wage levels for young people in the UK, limited access to the Revenu de solidarité active in France and reduced unemployment benefits for young people in Denmark, all of which, although intended to get young people into work, are unacceptable and can be counterproductive preventing young people from starting an economically independent life, especially in times of crisis with high youth unemployment,

M.

whereas the Lisbon Strategy’s benchmarks on youth and the modernisation of vocational training (VET) have not been fully met,

N.

whereas flexicurity has been the overall strategy for the EU’s labour markets, aiming at flexible and reliable contracts, lifelong learning, active labour-market policies and social security; whereas, unfortunately, in many countries this strategy has been narrowly interpreted as ‘flexibility’, losing sight of the holistic approach and of employment security and social security,

O.

whereas as a result of demographic change after 2020 a massive shortage in skilled labour will seriously affect the European economic area and this trend can be countered only by adequate education, training and retraining,

P.

whereas small and medium-sized enterprises play their part in the European economic fabric owing both to their number and to their strategic role in combating unemployment,

1.

Urges the Commission and the Member States to take a rights-based approach to youth and employment. The qualitative aspect of decent work for young people must not be compromised, and the core labour standards and other standards related to the quality of work, such as working time, the minimum wage, social security, and occupational health and safety, must be central considerations in the efforts that are made;

2.

Calls on the Council and the Commission to define a job strategy for the EU that combines financial instruments and employment policies in order to avoid ‘jobless growth’ and that entails setting ambitious benchmarks for the employment of young people; strongly encourages having in the job strategy a special focus on developing green jobs and jobs in the social economy, whilst ensuring that Parliament is involved in the decision-making process;

3.

Stresses how important it is for Member States to develop green jobs, for instance by providing training in environmental technologies;

4.

Invites the Member States to create efficient incentives, such as employment subsidies or insurance contributions for young people that will guarantee decent living and working conditions; in order to encourage public and private employers to hire young people, to invest both in quality job creation for young people and in continuous training and upgrading of their skills during employment, and to support entrepreneurship among youth; points to the special role and importance of small enterprises regarding expertise and traditional know-how; encourages ensuring that young people have access to the recently established European Microfinance Facility;

5.

Underlines the importance of entrepreneurial education, being an integral part of the process of acquiring the skills needed for new types of employment;

6.

Calls on the Member States to have ambitious policies on training young people;

7.

Calls on the Commission to promote and support – taking into account the beneficial national partnerships run between schools, universities, enterprises and the social partners – pilot projects in the new strategic development sectors which provide suitable scientific, technological and employment-oriented training for young people, and especially women, in order to promote innovation and competitiveness within enterprises, using study grants, higher education-level apprenticeships and non-atypical employment contracts for that purpose;

8.

Calls on universities to make contact with employers at an early stage and provide students with the opportunity to acquire skills needed for the employment market;

9.

Calls on the Member States to instigate wide-ranging measures aimed at stimulating the economy, such as tax reduction and reduction of the administrative burden on SMEs, in order to bring growth and create new jobs, especially for young people;

10.

Hopes for a successful take-up of microloans by young people; considers that the founders of start-ups must receive consistent and professional advice;

11.

Calls on the Member States to establish inclusive and targeted labour-market policies that secure the respectful inclusion and meaningful occupation of young people, e.g. through the setting-up of inspirational networks, trainee arrangements that include financial aid enabling the trainee to relocate and live close to the place where the traineeship is held, international career centres and youth centres for individual guidance covering particularly matters such as collective organisation and knowledge of legal aspects relating to their traineeship;

12.

Recognises the difficulties that young people encounter in gaining access to finance in order to set up and develop their own business; calls on the Member States and the Commission to adopt measures to facilitate young people’s access to finance, and to set up in cooperation with the business community mentoring programmes for young people on the creation and development of undertakings;

13.

Calls on the Member States to promote the skills of early school-leavers and prepare them for employment by means of innovative projects;

14.

Calls on the Member States to include cooperation between schools and employers at an early stage in their plans to redesign training schemes; considers that local and district authorities must be included in the planning of education and training as they have the network contacts with employers and know what employers need;

15.

Calls on the Commission to expand financial capacity for, and to ensure better use of, the European Social Fund, to earmark a minimum of 10 % of this fund for projects targeting young people and to ease access to the fund; urges the Commission and the Member States not to jeopardise the running of small and innovative projects through excessive control and to review the effectiveness and added value of programmes, such as ‘Youth in Action’, in terms of job opportunities for young people; urges the Member States to improve their targeting of youth;

16.

Urges the Member States to prioritise business-education provider co-operation as the right tool with which to combat structural unemployment;

17.

Calls on the Member States to intensify efforts to reduce early school leaving in order to achieve the goals set out in the EU 2020 Strategy of no more than 10 % of early school leavers by 2012; invites the Member States to make use of a wide range of measures to fight early school leaving and illiteracy, e.g. lowering the number of students in each class, providing assistance for pupils who cannot afford to complete their compulsory education, increasing the emphasis on practical aspects in the syllabus, introducing mentors in all schools, establishing an immediate follow-up of early school leavers; points to Finland which has succeeded in reducing the number of early school leavers by studying with them the possibility of seeking a new direction; invites the Commission to coordinate a project on best practices;

18.

Calls on the Member States to improve links between the educational system and the world of work and devise means of predicting demand for skills and abilities;

19.

Calls for efforts to ensure that all children receive the encouragement they need right from the start, and particularly to safeguard the targeted encouragement of children with language problems or other handicaps, so that they are afforded the greatest possible education and career opportunities;

20.

Calls for more and better apprenticeships; refers to the positive experiences with the dual system within Vocational Educational and Training (VET) in countries such as Germany, Austria and Denmark where the system is seen as an important part of young people’s transition from education to employment; calls on the Member States to support apprenticeship schemes and to incite companies to provide training opportunities for young people even in times of crisis; stresses the importance of adequate training to secure the high-skilled workforce companies will need in the future; stresses that apprenticeships must not replace regular jobs;

21.

Calls for better and secured internships; calls on the Commission and the Council, following the commitment given in Communication COM(2007)0498 ‘to propose an initiative for a European quality charter on internships’, to set up a European Quality Charter on Internships setting out minimum standards for internships to ensure their educational value and avoid exploitation, taking into account that internships form part of education and must not replace actual jobs. These minimum standards should include an outline of the job description or qualifications to be acquired, a time limit on internships, a minimum allowance based on standard-of-living costs in the place where the internship is performed that comply with national traditions, insurance in the area of their work, social security benefits in line with local standards and a clear connection to the educational programme in question;

22.

Calls on the Commission to provide statistics on internships in each Member State which include:

and to produce a comparative study on the different internship schemes existing in the EU Member States;

23.

Calls for each Member State to monitor compliance;

24.

Calls on the Member States to establish a European system for the certification and recognition of knowledge and skills acquired though apprenticeships and traineeships, which will help to increase young workforce mobility;

25.

Calls for young people to be protected from those employers – in the public and private sector – who, through work experience, apprenticeship and traineeship schemes, are able to cover their essential and basic needs at little or no cost, exploiting the willingness of young people to learn without any future prospect of becoming fully established as part of their workforce;

26.

Highlights the importance of promoting young people’s labour and training mobility across the Member States, and the need to improve the recognition and transparency of qualifications, skills and diplomas in the EU; calls for the redoubling of efforts to develop the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning and the European Quality Assurance Reference Framework for Vocational Education and Training, and for the Leonardo da Vinci programme to be strengthened;

27.

Calls upon the Member States to speed up the harmonisation of national qualification profiles and European qualification profiles so as to further increase the mobility of young people in the fields of education and work;

28.

Stresses the role of private sector education providers, as the private sector is usually more innovative in designing courses and more flexible in providing them;

29.

Urges the Member States to provide young people in traineeship, work experience or apprenticeship schemes with full workplace and social security entitlements, subsidising where appropriate a part of their contributions;

30.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to incorporate apprenticeship, traineeship and work experience schemes into the social security systems;

31.

Invites the Member States to strengthen their systems for educational guidance at the primary to secondary school stage, in order to help young people and their families select education and training channels that effectively correspond to actual aptitudes, abilities and aspirations, thereby reducing the risk of drop-out and failure;

32.

Recognises that, in times of crisis, young people seek education and should be encouraged to do so; calls on all Member States to secure equal access to education for all by guaranteeing a minimum right to free well-funded education from nursery school to university and by securing financial support for young students; invites the Member States to invest further in education and training, even if fiscal and social constraints are present, to implement the European Qualifications Framework as fast as possible and, where necessary, to establish national skills frameworks;

33.

Recalls that the aim of the Copenhagen process is to encourage individuals to make use of the wide range of vocational learning opportunities available (e.g. at school, in higher education, at the workplace, or through private courses);

34.

Calls on the Commission to expand EU programmes that support education and up-skilling, such as Lifelong Learning, the European Social Fund, the Marie Curie and Erasmus Mundus Actions and the Science Education Initiative;

35.

Calls for Member States to set up National Task Forces on Youth to ensure a stronger coherence between the educational system and the labour market, promoting a stronger and shared responsibility between government, employers and individuals for investing in skills; calls for the Member States to provide advisory bodies at all schools to help smooth the transition from education to the labour market and promote cooperation between public and private actors;

36.

Considers it extremely important to adapt the education and training system to the rapidly changing labour market and the demand for new professions;

37.

Considers language learning crucial for facilitating young people’s access to the labour market and for promoting their mobility and equal opportunities;

38.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to provide young people with information on the demands on the labour market, provided that suitable review mechanisms are introduced to monitor developments in occupations; calls on the Commission and the Member States to develop lifecycle-based policies and strategies in which education and employment are better integrated, in which safe transition is a key point and in which there is a constant up-skilling of the labour force providing them with the key competences required by the labour market;

39.

Calls on the Commission to intensify its work on recognition of professional qualifications, including non-formal learning and work experience, in order to support the mobility of young people;

40.

Calls upon the Member States to promote the recognition of educational achievements acquired in the framework of non-formal and informal learning so that young people can further demonstrate their education and competence as required when seeking work on the labour market;

41.

Calls for greater support and prestige for vocational training;

42.

Urges the Commission to revise the flexicurity strategy in conjunction with the social partners in order to place transition security at the top of the agenda while creating mobility and easier access for young people; underlines that flexibility without social security is not a sustainable way of combating the problems young people face on the labour market, but on the contrary is a way of evading young people’s labour and social security rights;

43.

Appeals to the Member States to include all four flexicurity components in the national designs for youth employment strategies, namely:

44.

Calls on the Member States and the social partners to secure quality work to prevent young people falling into the ‘precariousness trap’; calls on the Member States and the social partners, on the basis of existing national laws and in cooperation with the Commission, to establish and implement better standards protecting those who work in insecure or low-quality jobs;

45.

Calls on the Commission to assess the long-term consequences of youth unemployment and fairness between generations;

46.

Underlines the need for strong and structured social dialogue in all workplaces in order to protect young workers from exploitation and the often precarious nature of temporary work; underlines the need for the social partners to address young workers and their specific needs;

47.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to do more to ensure that the Employment Equality Directive, which outlaws discrimination on the grounds of age in employment, has been transposed correctly and is being implemented effectively; believes that much more must be done to ensure that both employees and employers are aware of their rights and obligations under this legislation;

48.

Calls on the Member States and the social partners to implement strategies to inform and educate young people on their rights at work and the various alternative routes to their integration in the labour market;

49.

Invites the Commission and the Member States to foster rapprochement between the worlds of work and education so that training paths such as dual training can be designed that combine theoretical notions with practical experience, in order to equip young people with the requisite general skills and specific expertise; invites the Commission and the Member States also to invest in support for an awareness campaign on vocational training (VET) and technical and entrepreneurial studies, so that these career paths are no longer perceived as a disqualifying choice, but as a chance to fill gaps in the market for technical jobs, demand for which is markedly increasing, and to rekindle the European economy;

50.

Calls on the Member States and the social partners to undertake more intensive planning and implementation of programmes to increase young people’s access to the labour market through active employment policies, particularly in those regions and sectors with high youth unemployment;

51.

Urges the Member States to absorb the impact youth unemployment will have on the pension rights of that generation and, by taking generous account of the time spent in education, give young people an incentive to continue their education for a long period;

52.

Calls on the social partners to intensify their efforts to inform young people of their right to participate in the social dialogue, and to boost participation by this large section of the economically active population in the structures of their representative bodies;

53.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that national legislation affecting youth, and in particularly national legislation based on the Employment Equality Directive (2000/78/EC), is not used to discriminate against young employees’ access to social benefits; believes that much more must be done to ensure that both employees and employers are aware of their rights and obligations under this legislation;

54.

Calls on the Member States to provide for initiatives likely to ensure that young immigrants can learn the language of their host country, that the qualifications they have acquired in their home country are recognised and that they have access to key skills, thereby enabling their social integration and participation in the labour market;

55.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to provide adequate and better childcare facilities, such as all-day schools, for young parents at an acceptable cost, thereby making it more possible for young parents, especially mothers, to be able to participate in the labour market;

56.

Calls for the assistance given by Member States to young parents in the form of either childcare or crèches to be substantial enough that it does not deter them from participating in the labour market;

57.

Calls for the Member States to establish a short-term effort focused on young unemployed men in the sectors affected by the crisis, while not losing sight of the long-term problems experienced by young women in accessing the labour market;

58.

Calls for the Member States to introduce affirmative action measures for young people in those areas of the labour market where youth is under-represented, so as to overcome the consequences of previous age discrimination and achieve a truly diverse workforce, making reasonable adaptations as appropriate for young people with disabilities; points to good experience as regards affirmative action in combating discrimination;

59.

Stresses the need to develop specific programmes for people with disabilities aimed at increasing their chances of accessing the labour market;

60.

Underlines the importance of encouraging traineeships and mobility for young people involved in schools or training for artistic activities such as the cinema, music, dance, the theatre or the circus;

61.

Considers that there should be greater support for volunteer programmes in various fields, including, inter alia, the social, cultural and sporting fields;

62.

Calls on the various branches of industry to set up generation partnerships in businesses and organisations and in this way generate an active exchange of know-how and combine productively the experience of different generations;

63.

Recognises the importance of young people being able to be financially independent and calls for the Member States to ensure that all young people are individually entitled to a decent level of income that secures for them the possibility of creating an economically independent life;

64.

Calls on the Member States to ensure that young people can, if they so wish, receive effective assistance in choosing their career, finding out about their rights and managing their minimum income;

65.

Suggests that the Council and the Commission come forward with a European Youth Guarantee securing the right of every young person in the EU to be offered a job, an apprenticeship, additional training or combined work and training after a maximum period of 4 months’ unemployment;

66.

Welcomes progress towards defining the EU 2020 Strategy but regrets that there has been no public and transparent evaluation of the Lisbon Strategy, and in particular of the European Youth Pact, including benchmarks for youth, and regrets that the social partners, civil society and youth organisations were not consulted sufficiently during the process of developing the EU 2020 Strategy;

67.

Calls on the Member States to introduce and assess new binding youth benchmarks; invites the Commission to evaluate annually existing youth benchmarks and the Youth Guarantee in order to deliver results and progress based on statistical information that is better disaggregated and broken down, especially by gender and age group;

68.

Calls on the Council and the Commission to agree to and deliver on new improved governance and information tools for the work on youth employment;

69.

Suggests the setting up of a permanent EU youth taskforce involving youth organisations, Member States, the Commission, Parliament and the social partners to monitor developments on youth employment, enable cross-section policies, share best practice examples and initiate new policies;

70.

Highlights the importance of involving young people in the setting up of education and training policies so that their needs can be better taken into account; recommends in that regard that the Commission consult representatives of national youth councils on the priorities for young people;

71.

Calls on the Member States to assess policy impacts on youth, to include youth in all processes and establish youth councils to monitor youth-related policies;

72.

Calls on the European Institutions to set a good example by removing their advertisements for unpaid traineeships from their respective websites and to pay:

73.

Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission and the governments and parliaments of the Member States.