Lisbon strategy, for employment: misguided ambition…

The exercise of the guidelines for employment has today become commonplace, and bogged down, in a vast administrative exercise of piling up reports, bureaucratic machinery denounced mezzo
voice by most of the experts concerned. Initially, however, ten years ago, this strategy of aligning joint reports and guidelines was a real innovation,
marked by a political, economic and social dynamism that has disappeared today.

More than ten years ago, the essentials had already been said and the objectives set
In the wake of the Amsterdam European Council, which decided to anticipate, in 1997, the new Title on employment, provided for in the Treaty of the same name, a Summit was held in Luxembourg, the
November 20 and 21, 1997, devoted exclusively to Employment. We believe we are dreaming...

The Fifteen set themselves objectives: "within five years" to move from passive treatment of unemployment to "active measures": increase in the number of unemployed,
benefiting from active measures, to gradually approach the "average of the three best performing Member States" (by at least 20%), "a new start for all young people before they
reaches six months of unemployment, to unemployed adults before they reach twelve months of unemployment". To compensate for school failure, we set ourselves a challenge: "substantially reduce the number
young people who leave the school system prematurely (50% in ten years, we will specify in 2000 in Lisbon). The employment rate targets proposed by the Commission (long-term target of
more than 70%, increase to 65% within 5 years), will be endorsed at the Lisbon summit. The Commission had also proposed a target of halving long-term unemployment rates and
unemployment rate for young people within five years (which had not been adopted then, already too ambitious!).

La management has not been forgotten, since a gradual reduction in the tax burden on labor and non-wage labor costs is planned, "without calling into question
the financial balance of social security systems”; the objective remaining defined nationally. The advisability of introducing a tax on energy or on polluting emissions or any
another tax measure or to reduce the VAT rate on "labour-intensive services not exposed to cross-border competition" is also listed.

An Invitation to Negotiate social partners is made for “agreements aimed at modernizing the organization of work, including flexible working arrangements, (…) in order to
to achieve the necessary balance between flexibility and security, for example on the annualisation of working time, the reduction of working time, the reduction of overtime, the
development of part-time work, "lifelong" training and career breaks. The word “flexicurity” is not pronounced. But everything is already said or the essential.
And more ambitiously. At the European summits in Lisbon and Nice in 2000, Laeken in 2001 and Barcelona in 2002, certain objectives will be specified and refined.

In 2008, what remains of this political and administrative commitment?
A few objectives have been achieved or are in the process of being achieved (employment rate). But no serious study has come to corroborate whether it is due to the European employment strategy or to
changes in the economic situation. On the other hand, several more strictly social objectives will not be achieved in 2010: where is the ambition to reduce school failure by half,
the number of excluded, the number of long-term unemployed? What about strengthening social services? Instead of seeking a remedy for this failure, the effect is masked by various artifices: date
stopper pushed back, objective removed, reference value changed. The obligation imposed on each Member State "in the European Union" has thus sometimes become a simple "average (...) at the level of
the EU" (e.g. retirement age).

In fact, the employment guidelines exercise has become the opposite of what it was at the start: an exercise in mutual stimulation to become a language exercise
wood, worthy of the best borrowings from the PolitBuro, where we congratulate ourselves on the results obtained – without looking to see if the cause is not in other phenomena (the world economy for example…),
where we evade failures – by revising the means, even by removing the objectives which we know for good that they cannot be achieved. It is time to face the facts: we have
perverted the European employment strategy set in Luxembourg.

Isn't it time to stop this charade that occupies a lot of time and energy? Or should we not go back to basics: a few precisely identified, quantifiable objectives,
assessed each year, designating good but also bad students? For that, we will no doubt have to wait for another European Commission, and at its head, a braver man than the current one
holder.