Employment Expansion Across European Union
The European Employment Strategy has paid off in terms of creating both more and better jobs, according to the new European Restructuring Monitor’s (ERM) annual report 2008 from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound). The report, which examines patterns of employment expansion in Europe between the years of 1995-2006, concludes that women workers in particular have benefited from this period of stronger European employment growth. Most Member States of the European Union have generated both more and better jobs in the decade since 1995, especially in the EU 15 area. The proportion of working age population in active employment has risen from 60% to 66% in the EU 15, with total employment growing by more than 22 million jobs. “The overall picture is very positive…. More and better jobs, and more opportunities for women, are created in Europe, representing a shift towards the knowledge economy,” says Jorma Karppinen, Eurofound’s Director. “But the same progress has led to increasing difficulties for low-skilled workers or workers displaced in declining industries. Policymakers have to be wary about stagnating employment growth in low-paid jobs. This can mean fewer employment opportunities for low-skilled workers at a time when the decline of new medium-quality jobs creates an obstacle to upward mobility in the employment structure.” The best performers in terms of job quantity and quality were Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg and Sweden, according to the ERM 2008 Report, More and better jobs: patterns of employment expansion in Europe. Most of the jobs were located in knowledge-intensive services, especially in the business services sector and the health and education sectors. In comparison, the report points out that other countries, including Spain, Greece and Italy also experienced a large expansion in employment, but this expansion was flatter in terms of quality and less concentrated in higher quality jobs. The Netherlands, France and Cyprus showed intense job creation at the top and at the bottom with a big gap in the middle. The report also concludes that low-paid jobs have become more atypical in the EU since 1995. In many countries, most employment created in low-paid jobs was part-time or fixed-term, whereas full-time permanent jobs in the low-paid segment were either destroyed or remained stagnant. Migrant workers from outside the EU tended to occupy the lowest-paid jobs. In Spain, Cyprus, Ireland and Greece, for example, the report points to the finding that most of the net jobs created in the two bottom job quality quintiles in these countries were taken up by non-EU nationals.
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