“Workers’ mobility: a right, a choice, a responsibility?”: this is the subject which, today and tomorrow, delegates from the EU Commission, politicians, experts of labour law and sociology, economists, demographers will discuss. The occasion is the international conference that opens the European Year of Professional Mobility, through which the EU aims at achieving three main targets: “Increasing the workers’ awareness of their rights to free mobility through the member states, the current possibilities of geographical mobility, labour mobility and the barriers that get in the way of potential mobile workers; promoting the exchange of good practices among the categories concerned, in particular public authorities and institutions, trade unions and the private sector; promoting an intensive investigation of the dimensions and nature or geographical and occupational mobility within the EU”. The conference, due to be held in the ancient EU Charlemagne building, will be opened by the speeches of the president of the Commission, José Manuel Barroso, the Austrian Minister of Economy and Labour, Martin Bartenstein (EU president on duty), the president of the Social Affairs Commission of the EU Parliament, Jan Andersson, the EU Commissioner for Social Affairs, Vladimir Spidla, and Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation for Economic Trends.
