What had brought me to Sofia was a meeting of the Secretaries-General of the national Economic and Social Councils. We were meeting in Sofia because the Bulgarian Economic and Social Council had kindly volunteered to act as the presidency of the network for the whole of this year. The Secretaries-General were meeting to prepare a November conference of the Presidents of the Economic and Social Councils on the theme of labour markets and the Lisbon Strategy. On the table at our meeting were detailed contributions prepared by the national councils on the short-term measures taken to deal with the current crisis. The meeting was opened by Bulgarian ESC President Professor Lalko Dulevsky and addressed by Emilia Maslarova, the Bulgarian Minister of Labour and Social Policy, before we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. My role, representing ‘Europe’, was to facilitate cooperation and coordination. More generally, though, the Commission President increasingly looks to the European Economic and Social Committee to use its networks (its members, their organisations, the national economic and social councils), particularly in the context of the current crisis. That was, indeed, the reason why the Committee, together with the national economic and social councils, was present in the margins of the Prague Employment Summit (at the specific invitation of President Barroso). Our own President, Mario Sepi, has made the European response to the crisis an absolute priority of his mandate and this meeting and the November conference form part of a continuum of activities aimed at generating operational responses, so I was looking for (horrid word) ‘deliverables’. Two worrying phenomena were already identified in the national contributions. The first is the risk of structural and permanent unemployment among older workers, described by one participant as the risk of a ‘lost generation’. The other is the risk of high unemployment among the young – a concern flagged up by President Barroso in a recent letter to Mario Sepi. We resolved to identify best practices and to start considering medium and longer-term strategies. By the autumn we will know whether this crisis is bottoming out or deepening. In either case, there is a lot of pain out there already and we were strongly aware of that.
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