Brussels, 18/10/2007
ETUC General Secretary John Monks welcomed the social partners' joint analysis. The ETUC supports its central message that the challenge facing the European labour market is not only to create more jobs. The challenge is also to create better jobs, to offer more security for workers in a labour market that is already very flexible, and to ensure improvements in employment and growth are accompanied by greater social cohesion and less inequality.
The ETUC also backs the social partners' balanced recommendations to the different policy-makers in Europe. At the Social Summit, the ETUC underlined in particular the call to tackle precarious work by improving protection for vulnerable workers, not by spreading bad practice through making all contracts insecure.
Labour market segmentation should be tackled by upgrading the position and the rights of atypical workers, by promoting stable employment relationships, and by respecting the letter and the spirit of the European social aquis, including the framework agreement stipulating that open-ended contracts remain the general rule.
Said John Monks: “With the European labour market already capable of a process of ‘creative destruction’, destroying around 4% of jobs and creating 5-8% of new ones every year, the most urgent issue is how to ensure the European labour market can offer more security for workers.”
Following the meeting of the ETUC Executive Committee today in Lisbon, which agreed a position on flexicurity, ETUC President Wanja Lundby-Wedin, told the Social Summit that the Commission’s flexicurity agenda must be rebalanced to make it more labour-friendly, by putting the quality of jobs and stable contractual arrangements at its heart.
The ETUC recognises that business and workers both need flexibility as well as security. However, the form of flexicurity the Commission proposes is unbalanced. By making flexible contracts and easy-firing the main principles, it undermines the stability of jobs and shifts the balance of power to business. In its resolution, the ETUC calls upon European policy-makers to set a policy agenda promoting internal flexicurity and the quality of jobs.
Said Wanja Lundby-Wedin, “Workers need security in change. We want to be able to be positive about the structural changes that are needed if we are to be able to compete with the rest of the world. In the view of the ETUC, security in change must include job protection, lifelong learning, unemployment benefits and active labour market policies.”
- Social partners' joint analysis