Youth Employment Initiative - prefinancing

Key points

The EESC:

• welcomes the efforts of the European Commission to substantially increase the initial pre-financing for the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI);

• agrees with the Commission about the need to adjust the Parliament and Council regulation on the European Social Fund in line with the proposal that was put forward;

• is convinced that this initiative should encourage Member States to prioritise the fight against youth unemployment in their national budgets. Bureaucratic procedures should neither prevent the efficient delivery of the 6 billion euros allocated to the Youth Employment initiative, nor slow down any other initiatives aimed at efficiently combatting current youth unemployment;

• considers the YEI to be an opportunity to review the future of work in member states – public employment services must become much more pro-active, better synergies between education and training and actors of the labour market must be created, young people must be adequately and promptly informed about their rights and opportunities;

• strongly encourages the involvement of organised civil society in the design and monitoring of the national YEI programmes on a partnership basis. It is convinced that involving the social partners will ensure the consent of large parts of the population and thus social stability[1];
• calls on the European Commission to closely monitor the challenges to the implementation of the YEI and especially to the Youth Guarantee. The monitoring process should not only be based on quantitative analysis but also on more qualitative indicators.