Friday 19th December 2008, 13:52Franco-German Welfare ReformsIt’s been interesting – well interesting for a geek like me – to follow some of the discussions between M. Sarkozy and Frau Merkel on the stimulus packages (or not) and the impact on each country’s economy to tackle recessionary pressures. The FT yesterday had an interesting article on responses to recession, economic and social similarities/differences and the unemployment rates in each country.
We are moving into the third year of our businesses in France and Germany. The teams there do a wonderful job as they are both developing new and different responses to welfare, employment and skills in markets where there is a very traditional ‘training’ structure in place as part of the active labour market programmes.
Our focus is making sure the pilots we operate in both countries are ‘demand led’. This applies to both our ‘business customers’ and the clients to whom we delver services. We need to provide the skills and support business needs for its future employers, which is even more critical as we enter recession. For our clients, we need to ensure we provide a personalised package of support that helps them overcome their barriers to work, supports their confidence and self esteem and equips them with up-to-date, relevant labour market skills.
We work in both France and Germany with those people most at risk of long term unemployment. As in the UK, a really important part of our work is around the broader issues people face outside skills, job applications or interview techniques. So, the work we do on helping people with health issues, housing, social problems, debt and the vast array of other areas where we add value are an important development area.
The New Year will see a renewed focus in Germany and France on the ‘join up’ of front line public services in our work with government. We have been sharing ideas with the French policy teams on issues for older people and people with health issues and are in the early stages of a new pilot supporting disengaged young people outside of the education, training and employment system. In Germany, our ‘family based’ pilot is delivering early success and enormous learning that we will apply in Germany and our operations in other countries.
As we look at the European economy and our work on welfare, skills and employment, we are also looking at opportunities for cross border employment programmes. Poland is embarking on massive infrastructure investment through its EU programmes and even with a repatriation of migrant labour force, there are opportunities for different skills matching with workers from different countries. It will need some hard work and a pilot or two but if we think about an EU economy, there are different supply and demand pressures that can allow unemployed people within one economy to operate effectively in another.
An EU wide ‘New Deal’ – mmmmm, might take a bit of work but there’s something to be done there. JCP already do it through a website so, we need to explore ideas. However, even though unemployment numbers increase there are still many thousands of unfilled vacancies and opportunities for our clients. There will be more redundancies yet and we need to look at the use of the temporary labour market to get our clients experience and a series of jobs as the market dyanamics change. Equally there continue to be jobs created and particularly at the ‘entry level’ where many of our hardest to help clients need access to opportunity.
Any ideas on EU wide welfare and employment models – drop us a line…..
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