This year marks the 10th anniversary of the European Strategy for Employment, launched during the summit in Luxembourg in 1997 to coordinate labour policies at the EU level within a common framework in which member states would implement national policies corresponding to shared objectives and priorities. The results are satisfactory: the employment rate has risen from 60.7% to 64.3%, while the percentage of long-term unemployed has dropped from the 5% of 1997 to the current 3.6%. Concurrently, female employment has risen to 57.1% (with a growth of over five percentage points), and an important growth – from 35.7% to 43.5% – has been registered in the 55-64 age group. During the conference held in Lisbon on Monday on the situation of labour in Europe, the EU Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs Vladimir Spidla declared that “the success of the European Strategy for Employment helps us to respond in a very concrete way to one of the great concerns of our populations: creating more numerous and better quality jobs”.
