Brussels, 08/03/2011
Commenting the Conclusions adopted by EPSCO Council, Joël Decaillon, ETUC Deputy General Secretary said: “Europe is obsessed with wage competitiveness. Thinking of benefits as something to be switched off and on at any time will undermine the structural reliability of benefit systems and, with that, the overall security of the labour market. Designing unemployment benefit systems to ‘make work pay’ quickly boils down to blaming the unemployed for being out of a job. Instead, benefit systems should be designed to ‘make transitions pay’. Unemployment benefit systems need to provide robust security at all times, irrespective of whether the economy is going up or going down.”