This March 6, 2024 report, prepared for the European Commission by Jörg Markowitsch & Ágota Scharle, details the trends in long-term unemployment in Europe and the innovative job guarantee programs that seek to address that perennial issue.
Executive summary: “Long-term unemployment remains a persistent challenge in the European Union underlining the need for new innovative approaches. With this in mind, the ESF+ Social Innovation+ Initiative will focus on territorial measures that address long-term unemployment, and with a budget of EUR 23 million allocated in 2024, the European Commission aims to support the testing, transfer, and scaling up of innovative solutions to tackle this challenge.
This report sets the scene for these activities by mapping and analysing ‘Zero Long-Term Unemployment’ (Zero LTU) and job guarantee initiatives across Europe. It explores existing research, peers into long-term unemployment statistics and provides a conceptual framework for comparison. Besides a literature review, it is methodologically built mainly on an online survey conducted in autumn 2023 among members of the ESF+ Social Innovation+ Initiative Communities of Practice (CoP) and on interviews with key individuals involved in Zero-LTU and job guarantee initiatives.
The report details five ongoing initiatives in Europe including Austria’s Marienthal Job Guarantee Pilot (MAGMA), France’s Territoires zéro chômeur de longue durée (TZCLD) as well as the Belgium’s adaptation of the French model, Germany’s Solidaric Basic Income (SBI) project and the Netherland’s Basisbaan. These initiatives share common features such as addressing long-term unemployment through local and regional approaches, building on voluntary participation, offering fair remuneration and flexible working hours. As such, they need to be distinguished from basic income experiments that do not offer jobs, as well as from public works and ‘transitional’ employment schemes that focus on activating and returning participants to the primary labour market, often including the loss of benefits.”