Enhancing labour mobility to support economic recovery

Key points

The EESC:

• believes that, at a time of great economic uncertainty, labour mobility in the EU could play a key role in the EU's economic recovery and growth prospects;
• underlines the need for a more in-depth analysis on the reasons why the stock of EU movers of working age is growing by a smaller percentage than in previous years, aside the restrictions caused by the pandemic;
• calls for a study to determine the economic cost of the current state of the labour market;
• recommends more effective national measures with an emphasis on active labour market policies;
• calls on the European Commission to take measures that will both prevent brain drain and advance upward social and economic convergence;
• calls on Member States to ease mobility for persons with disabilities, and it also believes that gender equality is crucial to increasing labour mobility in the EU;
• exhorts the European Commission to monitor social security coordination and to make sure that any new issues, such teleworking from abroad, are addressed consistently. It further urges increased efforts to establish a European Social Security Number as a potential means of removing barriers to accessing social security in cross-border situations;
• observes that for businesses to maintain a competitive advantage and to attract skilled workers, it is essential to provide decent working and employment conditions, as well as quality-of-life aspects like the availability of good schools and recreational facilities;
• in order to address skill mismatches in EU labour markets and assess the impact of events like the war in Ukraine and the migrations of working-age people within and between EU Member States, emphasizes the importance of ongoing statistical analysis of labour mobility flows.