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EUROPEAN REVIEW

ISSUE 25 - Page 8

EU's new jobs portal aims to aid mobility

EDUCATION AND FLEXIBILTY ARE OFTEN SEEN as the watchwords for the new Europe of increasing job opportunity which is to be created before 2010 but another aspect of the EU labour market that must be improved is mobility. The geographical mobility of EU citizens is calculated to be about half that in the USA. Now the Commission has come up with a web site which it hopes will help to break down the barriers of language, tradition, differing laws and qualifications.

The European Employment Services (EURES) site will now offer a job mobility portal. This organisation, which brings together all the public employment services plus the social partners in EU Member States, can put job seekers in touch with employers in a number of ways. CVs can be uploaded onto the web site, employers can register the attributes that they are looking for in recruits and the two matched up. It is also possible for job seekers to simply enter the kind of job, the length of contract and the country that they are interested in to gain access to vacancies. When the European Review tried out this facility we came up with no results for several searches where all these options were specified. However when we simply searched for 'waiter' we found many vacancies in the UK and Ireland while 'serveur' resulted in similar numbers in France and Switzerland. The need to be multilingual when using the site was underlined when a search for 'manager' returned many job ads in German only. 'Doctor' as key word found vacancies ranging from X-ray nurse to the chair of philosophy at Leiden University.

The home page of the EURES job portal

Research workers seem to be especially well catered for, having their own separate search facility which returned too many results to fit on one page. Other links on the site include 'statistics' which reveal Spain has the most companies and the most job seekers registered while 'waiters and bartenders' come second only to 'systems engineers and programmers' as the most wanted category of vacancy. The 'living and working' link can provide information on all Member States including finding accommodation, finding a school, taxes, cost of living, health, social legislation, comparability of qualifications, etc. though this was not available for Greece, the country that we checked.

Web pages mentioned on this page are available at :

EURES English home page is at::	http://europa.eu.int/eures/home.jsp?lang=en
The CV job search page is at:	http://europa.eu.int/eures/main.jsp?acro= cv&lang=en&catId=53&parentId=0
'Living and Working' information on all EU countries is at:	http://europa.eu.int/eures/main.jsp?acro= lw&lang=en&catId=490&parentId=0
The 'find a job' page is at:	http://europa.eu.int/eures/main.jsp?acro= job&lang=en&catId=52&parentId=0

UNISON launches Health & Safety web site

THE UK'S LARGEST TRADE UNION, UNISON, has added to its presence on the web by inaugurating new pages aimed at improving health and safety in the community and voluntary sector. 'Community and voluntary sector employers often hide their heads in the sand when it comes to health and safety, yet this is just storing up trouble for the future' said national officer for the voluntary sector, Rosalie Ward. Often they then try to solve the problem by bringing in expensive consultants when what is needed is simple, straightforward information on health and safety and the involvement of workplace safety advisers. The web site aims to provide this with a health and safety check list as well as links to 'how to write a health and safety policy', 'the law', 'risk assessment', 'consulting the workforce', 'stress', 'RSI' and 'violence'. UNISON hopes that the health and safety advantages to employers of union membership will enable it to add to its 40,000 members in this sector.

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