Blog Articles

On 26 November the European Commission released the Annual Growth Survey (AGS) Package. This set of documents kicks off the annual cycle of economic governance known as the European Semester, setting out general economic and social priorities for the European Union and providing Member States with policy guidance for the following year.

Despite the widespread and overly optimistic rhetoric of economic and social recovery we often heard in recent months, the draft Joint Employment Report describes a situation of uneven improvements and persistent divergence among and within Member States. Besides some good signs in the labour markets – employment rates are increasing again and unemployment rates are falling in almost all Member States – negative trends remain: continued wage moderation, increasing share of long term unemployment, exclusion and under-representation of women and youth in the labour markets. The situation is more worrying when looking at social indicators, with 122 million people still at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU in 2014 and a broad and increasing dispersion of inequality figures.

Against this background, the AGS 2016 falls short of expectations. Behind the general goal of bringing recovery to a sustainable path and reviving the convergence process, it maintains the main policy priorities of last year: re-launching investments, pursuing structural reforms to modernise our economies, and responsible fiscal policies.

Improvements cannot be denied. This year’s AGS stresses the importance of social investment and recognises that it offers economic and social returns over time; it calls on Member States to promote investment in healthcare, childcare, housing support and rehabilitation services; it recognises that labour markets should facilitate the transition towards more permanent contracts; it calls for a renewed process of upward economic and social convergence.

What is worrying however – besides some unfortunate linguistic choice such as the passage that describes the need of social protection systems to confront poverty instead of preventing it – is the logic that seems to prevail when you go behind political statements. Flexicurity has come back as a benchmark and social policies are reduced to an activation tool. The need to “make work pay” is clear across the whole text and, even when it comes to ultimate safety nets such as minimum income schemes, the need to provide incentives for labour market participation (i.e. negative conditionalities) is made clear.

Yet, social policies are more than that. Poverty and social exclusion are a multidimensional phenomenon and the idea that everything can be solved through employment is a weak and wrong one. At Social Platform we know that and we will raise our voice for a real change.