Young people today find it increasingly difficult to get a decent and stable job, despite being the best educated generation ever and youth is highly suffering the effects of the economic crisis. Concretely, more than 5.5 million young people in the EU under 25 years old were unemployed in December 2009, equivalent to 21.4 % of all young people, in some European countries rises up to 40%. This was twice as high as the overall unemployment rate.
The EU 2020 strategy is the last opportunity that the Commission and member states have to avoid the risk of a lost generation. Therefore the following points must be included in it.
We demand to the EU institutions:
•to guarantee every young person in the EU the right to have a stable job, regardless of origin, gender, citizenship, culture, social position or religion.
•the creation of a European strategy to guarantee youth labour rights, which must: guarantee decent living and working conditions; provide a basic income; develop green jobs and jobs in the social economy; have ambitious policies on training young people; encourage public and private employers to hire young people; ensure that youth have access to the recently established European Microfinance Facility; establish inclusive and targeted labour market policies.
•the appropriate implementation and transposition of the Employment Equality Directive, which outlaws discrimination on the grounds of age in employment.
•the creation of a European Youth Guarantee and demand on a national level the immediate implementation in order to secure the right to a job for every young person in the EU, an apprenticeship, additional training or combined work and training after a maximum period of 4 months’ unemployment.
•promotion and support of apprenticeships and employment orientated training for young people, especially women, including lifelong training and learning programmes for continued personal development. Education must be free, ideologically independent, plural, equally accessible to all, of high quality, and meet the individual developmental needs of each student.
•the EU must stop normal employment being substituted for traineeships. A European quality charter must be used to put in place limits to protect young workers. This charter must include: Internships should not last longer than six months and must not replace real jobs; a minimum allowance based on standard-of-living costs of the place where the internship is performed; social security benefits to all their interns.
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