The slight improvement in the employment rates and the stabilisation in the job vacancy rate demonstrated in the Eurostat report are positive signs for the employment landscape in the EU. However, a significant amount of work must is still to be done to get those who are still unemployed into work and improve their current situation, especially the long-term unemployed.

A slight increase in employment

Although unemployment remains very high in the EU, the number of persons in employment continues to increase. The recently published data by Eurostat shows that the employment rate went up by 0.2% in the EU as a whole and 0.3% in the Eurozone compared to the previous quarter. The increase is even bigger compared to the same quarter of 2014, when the unemployment rate was 0.8% higher in the Eurozone and 0.9% higher in the EU. The Eurostat estimates conclude that 151 million people were employed in the Eurozone and 228.8 were employed in the EU28. The highest increases in employment were recorded in Portugal (1.3%) and Greece (1.2%) while decreases were recorded in Finland (-0.3%), the United Kingdom (-0.2%), Bulgaria (-0.1%) and Lithuania (-0.1%).

Job vacancy rates remain stable

On this same note, the job vacancy rate in the European Union did not change compared to the first quarter of the year, staying at 1.7%, but up from 1.6% in the second quarter of 2014. The job vacancy rate is defined as the number of unfilled jobs expressed as a proportion of the labour force. Job vacancy rates reflect the unmet demand for labour as well as potential mismatches between the skills that employers seek and the skills that those who are unemployed can offer. The European countries that recorded the highest job vacancy rates were Belgium (2.7%), Germany (2.7%) and the United Kingdom (2.5%). The lowest job vacancy rates were recorded in Latvia (0.5%) and Poland (0.6%).

The critical situation of the remaining unemployed

However, these positive trends should not mask the fact that roughly half of the unemployed labour force in the European Union is made up of long-term unemployed persons (those who have been unemployed for more than a year), representing 5.1% of the active population in the EU. The rights and living conditions of the unemployed in the European Union has been further worsened by the recent ruling of the European Court of Justice stating that host countries can stop welfare payments to people from other Member States when they stop work if they have been working in the country for less than a year and have stopped job seeking. In these cases, national authorities have the right to cut off their benefits after six months, and may even deport them if they are considered by the authorities as an “unreasonable burden” on the State.