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The European TUC also made their priorities clear.
Their proposals for tackling the job crisis included:
Other ideas for fighting unemployment were floated by the European Parliament Socialist Group, led by London MEP Pauline Green. They called on the summit to allow VAT cuts as a route to job creation, set detailed targets on jobs, and a make a commitment to halve youth unemployment within three years.
"I do not understand how people who accepted concrete targets for economic and monetary union cannot accept concrete targets for employment", said a spokesman for the group.
Not forgetting its activist roots, the ETUC also organised a protest of the unemployed, and a crowd of 30,000 people duly attended on 20 November, the day of the summit's opening.
Two days later the main decisions of the summit were communicated to a waiting world. There are to be twice yearly meetings between labour and management organisations, Council presidents - past, present and future - and the Commission to review the implementation of the guidelines; an additional ECU10bn is to be made available for small and medium sized enterprises and new technology; ECU450m will be made available to aid job creation in small businesses; Europe will adopt annual guidelines for tackling unemployment; and each member state will report back once a year.
The ETUC saw a positive change in the European approach to fighting unemployment, "clearly not inspired by labour market deregulation theories" according to Emilio Gabaglio, general secretary.
The UK press was less impressed, but had expected very little anyway.
Stephen Hughes, chair of the influential Committee on Social Affairs, told the European Review that he saw the outcome as positive. "The guarantees given to the long term unemployed and the young unemployed as well as the agreement on a benchmark to double the proportion of the unemployed in training within a five year time scale are all to be welcomed and will have a positive impact on the policy mix at member state level", he said.
"Most important of all was the clearest possible agreement on the need to create a set of mechanisms on the employment side of the equation within the European Treaty equivalent to that which exists on the monetary side in the form of the broad economic guidelines and convergence criteria."
The guidelines are based on employability, adaptability, entrepeneurship and equal opportunities. They focus in particular on getting young people into work or training, modernising work organisation, reconciling work and family life, and encouraging the growth and expansion of labour in the private sector.
The guidelines are fairly detailed; the modernisation paragraph, for example, is unusually specific. It states that "the social partners [workers' representatives and employers] are invited to negotiate, at the appropriate level... agreements to modernise the organisation of work, including flexible working arrangements... such agreements may, for example, cover the expression of working time as an annual figure, the reduction of working hours, the reduction of overtime, the development of part-time working, lifelong training and career breaks."
The ETUC commented that while trade unions are ready to accept their responsibilities, employers must do likewise &emdash; at both European and national levels. But it noted in the same statement that the role of the social partners was underlined on a number of occasions. And in recognising that the EU must directly address the problems of industrial change and its impact on employment, the Council, it said, has given a first response to trade union demands.
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