Brussels to Send Employment Experts to Spain in February
February 1st, 2012
The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, sent the Spanish Government a letter yesterday announcing his intention to send EU employment experts to Spain in February in order to help fight youth unemployment.
The initiative will also take in the other seven Member States whose youth unemployment rates exceed 30%: Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The youth unemployment rate in Spain reached 48.7% in December, the highest in the EU, according to data released by Eurostat on Tuesday. The EU executive’s spokeswoman, Pia Ahrenkilde, said of these figures “We must act now, and in the short term, to do more to combat the urgency of youth unemployment. It is unacceptable to have these very alarming rates of youth unemployment in some Member States”.
The EU experts are “to visit each of the countries concerned in February, for one or two days, to identify where the EU contribution could be useful to help develop a youth employment plan”, said the spokeswoman. These missions were endorsed by EU leaders at their summit on Monday.
Europa Press reported that the EU officials will form ‘action teams’ along with the Spanish authorities, employers and unions. These teams must then consider how best to use the 10,700 million euros in European aid which has been assigned to Spain up to 2013, and which has not yet been spent.
“One of the objectives of these ‘action teams’ should be to agree on how to accelerate and, where necessary, redirect these uncommitted funds”, said Ahrenkilde. They must also “review the priorities of existing programs in order to have more impact on measures for young people and job creation in SMEs”, she added, stressing that “there are no new funds” for fighting youth unemployment.
Another of these teams’ tasks will be to determine how to promote the use of the EU exchange programs for Erasmus and Leonardo students and trainees.
The ‘action teams’ will have a period of eleven weeks, until mid-April, to develop an action plan to combat this problem. On Monday the Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, made it clear he was prepared to send his own experts to Brussels in order to accelerate the implementation of these measures.
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It’s a cultural thing as much as anything else. Not often that I agree with Spanish archbishops, but according to Typically Spanish, the Archbishop of Granada, Javier Martínez, has attacked youngsters who want to become civil servants, considering the Spanish mentality of a ‘subsidised society’ as a ‘social illness’, especially in a time of crisis such as now.
He made his comments during his Homily to the Eucharist held on Sunday in the Sacromonte Abbey in Granada, celebrating the festive day of San Cecilio. Making reference to the current social situation he criticised those who always expected somebody else to solve their problems.
‘We have to change the mentality of a subsidised people’, he said. He remembered that when he became a Bishop he carried out his own survey which showed that about 80% of Spanish youngsters wanted to become a civil servant. ‘It’s a social illness’ he said, calling for a ‘change in culture’, which in his opinion was linked to having faith and ‘a certain capacity for taking risks’ which would be necessary to recover a sign of Christian identity.
He noted that since the crisis started most people hoped that their problems would be solved for them by the authorities.