The EU Commissioner for Employment calls for investing in requalifying workers and creating quality jobs

EU Employment Commissioner Nicholas Schimt has called for investing more in the skills of people to improve productivity and create quality jobs from “adequate” minimum wages.

Schmit has participated this Monday in Vitoria-Gasteiz in the IV Congress of the employment congress in which the first vice president of the Spanish Government Nadia Calviño; the Second Vice President and Minister of Employment and Labor, Idoia Mendia, and the President of the Economic and Social Council of Spain, Antón Costas.

Nicholas Schimt has warned that inequalities between highly qualified workers and those with low qualifications have been increasing, which, together with the rise in food and energy prices, has led to full-time workers “who cannot live properly. decent”. “One in ten workers is at risk of poverty in the EU,” he denounced.

The commissioner has asked the EU countries to “take advantage” of the recovery to “rebuild economies” from the balance and modernization of social protection. That means, he added, “investing much more in education, requalification and training, as well as in social infrastructure.”

Regarding the Basque Autonomous Community, Schimdt recalled that a certain polarization persists in the labor market, with many people with high qualifications and, at the other extreme, very low. For this reason, he has asked to focus on improving the qualification of the “less prepared” with incentives and requalification plans.

The Minister of Labor and Employment of the Basque Government, Idoia Mendia, has said that he does not understand economic progress without social cohesion and that from the administrations there is a commitment to ensure that the new job is better than the one that existed before the pandemic.

Mendia explained that the future of quality employment will have a lot to do with training, “with updating professional skills and competencies to adapt to changes”. He has defended collaboration and “co-governance” to guarantee competitiveness in the country, because according to Mendia social cohesion is, “in addition to an objective of a fair solution to this crisis, an investment” in that competitiveness.

Nadia Calvin, for his part, has ensured that relations with social agents are currently “excellent” and recalled that before the end of 2021 they will have to close agreements both in the field of pensions and in the workplace.

Calviño explained that the objective of the labor reform is to eradicate precariousness, improve the quality of employment and the competitiveness of companies, before adding that he hopes to reach a good agreement before the end of the year.

Regarding the pension reform, he has shown his hope that the social agents will support the Spanish Government so that the system is “strong in the medium and long term”, but also “as progressive and fair as possible”.