A plan to create 12 million new jobs in the EU over the next five years was passed yesterday in the European Parliament, but efforts to set targets to tackle the problem more specifically were voted down by MEPs.
Mr Padraig Flynn, the EU Social Affairs Commissioner, said the EU would not remain a zone of high unemployment for the next decade, as it had been for much of the last. Employment ambitions were realistic and attainable, he said.
The report, prepared by Mr Wim van Velzen, a Dutch MEP, called for a specific package of practical measures. A heavily amended resolution will now be the basis of the Parliament's contribution to the EU employment summit in Luxembourg next month. The President of the EU Commission, Mr Jacques Santer, said he believed that 12 million jobs could be created within five years. There could now be true co-ordination of the employment market for the first time.
The resolution called for tax cuts to create jobs and there was support for the social security systems across Europe to be adjusted and to act as an incentive to employment.
In his address to the Parliament, Mr Flynn said there had been a sea-change in the fight for jobs which had been brought about by the Amsterdam Treaty. Action was needed urgently to tackle the "statistics of shame" of EU unemployment.
A fifth of the population left education and training with no marketable skills and a tenth of the workforce had no opportunity to train.
The current economic policy needed to be sustained in the next few years, he said, and he reminded MEPs that in the second half of the 1980s in a weaker economic situation 10 million new jobs had been created.
Mr Flynn said he proposed to set up a uniform database which would enable the performance of member-states to be measured.