The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of a bundle of measures on Tuesday aimed at fighting unemployment in Europe. One of the new instruments included in the package is the European Skills Passport.
According to EU statistics, the unemployment rate in the European Union is about 10 per cent. According to the Commission, 5.6 million jobs were lost throughout Europe since the economic crisis began in 2008. Mr László Andor, EU Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, said: “Our priority is to get people working. We simply cannot afford an unemployment rate of close to 10 per cent. The crisis has wiped out any past progress, so we urgently need to reform labour markets, make sure skills are in line with demand, and ensure working conditions are right for job creation.”
The actions of the European strategy to tackle unemployment include, among others:
– Creating new contracts in employment law in order to extend the use of open-ended contracts with a sufficiently long probation period, and a gradual increase of protection rights. This should reduce the divisions between those holding temporary and permanent contracts;
– A new “European Skills, Competences and Occupations classification” to bring together more closely the worlds of employment, education and training. The European Skills Passport will be part of this approach and is meant to help record citizens skills in a “transparent and comparable way” so as to ensure their recognition throughout the member states;
– Reviewing the European employment legislation, especially the health and safety directives;
– Lowering the administrative burdens in the labor market and lowering taxes on labor and mobility to “ensure the right labour market conditions are in place for job creations.”
The European Skills Passport
Explaining the reasons for introducing the new skills passport, the Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, Ms Androulla Vassiliou, said: “Today it is more crucial than ever that all citizens receive high-quality education and training to equip them with the skills they need to find work. Lifelong learning must become a reality in Europe.”
The passport will also make it easier for volunteer workers to go abroad in Europe to gain experience, learn new skills, gain new knowledge, and in the end help them to better find a job in any of the member states, as the skills certified in the passport will be comparable and acknowledged throughout the Union.
According to a statement from the European Parliament Information Office in Ireland, the new scheme and the passport are of special significance to Ireland: “Volunteering is an important and intrinsic part of Irish society. Ireland is home to one of the largest volunteer-led sporting organisations in the world, and has strong volunteer links with organisations such as the Special Olympics.”
Mr Liam Aylward, MEP for Ireland East and a Member of the European Parliament Committee on Culture, Education and Sport, worked directly on the Report and has welcomed its ambitious scope. “Over 100 million people volunteer regularly across Europe and people of all ages are participating in volunteering in the fields of education, culture, youth policies, sport, the environment, sustainable development, health and rights advocacy,” said Mr Aylward. “With this investment in our society and our community comes experience and skills, and the proposed ‘European Skills Passport’ relating to skills acquired through volunteering will improve the mobility of volunteers and create a vital link between non-formal learning, formal learning and employment.”
One aspect the Irish MEP put special emphasis on in the negotiations was coach education and training, and the transferability of these skills. “I am particularly pleased that my recommendations in relation to a training and qualifications framework for coaching and sports volunteers were supported in the Report. It is important that the investment in time and resources that goes into training coaches is recognised, and that the skills gained are transferable,” said Mr Aylward.
“Generation Internship”
There is more than one side to the new scheme, however. Opposition to the passport might be based on a fundamentally different understanding of what volunteering is, and is supposed to be. It may be argued that volunteering is something people do out of the goodness of their hearts, and that it is not done for the purpose of learning new skills or preparing for the job market. If such a motive was either the major consideration or the most likely outcome of the European Skills Passport, this could lead to many young people serving as cheap labour under the cover of volunteering – a phenomenon known as “Generation Internship”.
This phenomenon is recognised throughout Europe, but led to an outcry in recent years, especially in Germany. A study there conducted by the German trade union federation in 2007 found that 40 per cent of university graduates had to complete one or more internships before being hired to a paid job. On average, such internships lasted for 6 months, and the pay averaged a mere 600 euro for the whole internship. Participants often reported that they replaced a regular employee.
The European Skills passport is thus not without critics. One of the members of the European Parliament who argued against it is Roger Helmer, UK MEP for the East Midlands, who announced on his blog that he would vote against it. Only 23 MEPs voted no, however, with 63 abstaining from voting and 603 in favour.
In Mr Helmer’s view, the new approach breeds a false understanding of volunteering. He said: “For the Brussels apparatchiks, volunteering is not a voluntary, bottom-up, charitable activity. Rather, it’s one more top-down activity, to be controlled, and regulated, and bureaucratised.”
Another reason for his opposition is that the European Parliament has also formulated a task for national authorities: to ensure stable funding and provide tax incentives for the organisations concerned.
In Mr Helmer’s view, such funding would be wasted, and not worth government support. He said that volunteering does, to some extent, happen abroad, like projects to build clinics in Africa. He said: “Surely the overwhelming bulk of volunteering is local — it’s the local Rotary Club raising money for charity; it’s standing by the supermarket in the snow and holding out the collecting tin for the local hospice; it’s fund-raising for a new scanner at the local hospital.”
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