The President of the Tuscany Region presented yesterday to the members of the European Parliament's Employment Committee the opinion of the Committee of the Regions responding to the Council Recommendation for the integration of the long-term unemployed into the labour market. "Even with the knowledge of the legal constraints imposed by the EU Treaty, limiting the overall action at European level to tackle unemployment, I am convinced that the crisis of legitimacy and credibility of the European project cannot be addressed without adequate protection of the weakest individuals", stressed the rapporteur in his opening remarks.
President Rossi reminded that, according to the European Commission's data for the third quarter of 2015, very long-term unemployment still represents 48.2% of all unemployment in the EU, with unsustainable imbalances among the 28 Member States: in Greece, 73.7% of all unemployed are log-term unemployed, in Croatia 67.5% and in Slovakia 67%, while there are overall 10.5 million Europeans unemployed for over a year, 4.5 million of whom have been out of work for over two years.
Given the magnitude of the challenge, Rossi insisted on the urgent need for coordinated EU action, even through the creation of a special fund to help Member States in difficulty. "The Council Recommendation leaves to individual Member States, even those worst hit by the crisis, the whole burden of reorganising their employment services, which makes them more likely to fail since they have the highest unemployment rates and fewer resources to deal with the problem", stressed Rossi. He went on to underline: "This approach is based on a very restrictive interpretation of the concept of subsidiarity and ends up weakening the perception of the role of the Union, already extremely fragile today".
The presentation was followed by a lively debate amongst MEPs, with some welcoming the fact that the CoR opinion goes much further in its political recommendations than the European Parliament resolution, while others were critical of the proposal for the creation of a EU fund to combat long-term unemployment.
EMPL Vice-Chair Marita Ulvskog (S&D/ Sweden) welcomed Enrico Rossi's presentation and expressed the wish for stronger interinstitutional cooperation in the future.
