ECONOMIC growth, essential as it is, is not enough to create jobs, Mr Padraig Flynn, the EU Commissioner with responsibility for social affairs, said in Dublin yesterday.
Member states have come to understand that if growth is to be translated into jobs they must modernise their labour markets, he told a conference on civil and social rights in the EU.
Mr Flynn said 18,500,000 people were registered as unemployed across the Union and that the true figure was probably higher. "People, above all the young, experience problems in finding work," he added. "Many, of those who are in jobs feel uneasy and insecure, even when they are well qualified, as we go through a period of massive social and economic change."
Baroness Williams said the EU should reject the poverty now emerging in the Union, the hopelessness of long term unemployment and widening inequalities. The former Mrs Shirley Williams said the European social model, once a beacon of a caring society, has become over regulated and rigid, unable to respond to a fast changing and globalised world economy.
"Its system of benefits and pensions is largely financed by charges on labour and on employers, some as high as 50 or 60 per cent of wages," she said. "In modern economies where few jobs are secure and permanent, and where many people are self employed, such social overheads can be job killers".
She criticised the existing social model as being exclusively agreed between employers and unions, excluding the interests of the unemployed and the poor.
Ms Noreen Byrne, chairwoman of the National Women's Council of Ireland, said women's civil and social rights remain "the major unfinished business".
According to Ms Byrne, it is pointless to talk about mobility rights in Europe if a woman cannot gain access to a place on a local FAS training scheme to get even a first foothold on the employment ladder.