A selection of policies and priorities to create inclusive labour markets and combat child poverty
Newsletter 2011-3
Publication date : 2011-12-02
Ensuring inclusive labour markets and combating child poverty are key challenges facing Member States with respect to the Europe 2020 strategy target for social inclusion. Some examples of policies being used by Member States throw light on how the challenges can best be addressed. Creating inclusive labour markets requires two approaches. First, it involves developing targeted measures to help groups who are persistently on the edge of the labour market (e.g. older people, young people, women and disadvantaged groups). Secondly, and equally importantly, it entails structuring the labour market in a way that ensures work that pays. Getting older people to remain in employment for longer is important as a means of increasing labour market participation and it has the added benefit of easing pressure on pension systems and public finances. Three policy approaches to achieving this are evident across Member States: making it easier to remain employed with flexible working and pension combinations, the imposition of stricter rules for retirement including increasing the retirement age, and policies which subsidise employers to hire older workers. The economic climate has made it particularly hard for young people to make the transition from education to employment. Austria and the Netherlands have bolstered training options for the young. In Spain, a Working Group has been created to explore early school leaving with support from the European Social Fund. Many countries have policies in place to increase the participation of women in the labour market. The best results tend to come from multidimensional approaches which combat the constraints preventing women from combining their family responsibilities with paid employment, tackle gender discrimination in the workplace and address inequality in pay and promotion. Policies to help disadvantaged groups, including migrants and other vulnerable groups, enter employment generally require several different authorities to work together. For example, in Norway and Spain the success of policies to integrate migrants stems from various organisations cooperating together. An example of a strong policy for making work pay which combines incentives to work and social minima to guarantee an adequate standard of living through work is found in France, while working tax credits are used extensively in Ireland and the UK. Elsewhere, personal income taxes have been reduced on low pay or abolished completely and activation measures, sometimes with a firm obligation to take up employment, have been strengthened. Around two thirds of Member States recognise child poverty as a significant challenge and have developed national indicators to measure progress in reducing it. The countries concerned tend to put policies in place to increase the income and access to services of families where children are at particular risk of poverty (in particular for families with three or more children, one-parent families and those living in jobless households). Successful strategies to tackle child poverty require a comprehensive approach which combines measures to increase the income of families with children (both through enabling parents’ access to the labour market and ensuring adequate levels of child income support) with policies which ensure access to high quality services (child care, health and social services, housing, education, play and recreation). Indeed, the success of a strategy depends on exploiting the complementarities from implementing a wide-ranging set of measures. It is important to ensure, in particular, that children’s rights and well-being are a priority across the policy spectrum, that there is a balance between developing good policies for all children and specific initiatives to help children facing particular disadvantages, that there is an emphasis on early intervention to help families and children in vulnerable situations, that there is effective participation of children and representative bodies in the process, that regular data are collected, monitored and analysed and that there is meaningful communication between those setting targets and those delivering services on the ground. Creating inclusive labour markets
Combating child poverty
