Overzicht Europees fonds voor aanpassing aan globalisering 2012: 15.700 ontslagen werknemers gesteund (en)

The European Globalisation Adjustment Fund (EGF) helped a total of 15 700 workers dismissed due to the economic crisis and the effects of globalisation find new job opportunities in 2012, according to a report adopted by the European Commission.

The EGF provided more than €73.5 million to assist workers in 11 Member States (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden) matched by another €51.7 million from national resources.

The EGF provides funding for concrete measures to help dismissed workers improve their employability and find new job opportunities. An advantage of the EGF is that it can be used to finance measures tailored to the specific circumstances of the workers concerned. Such measures include:

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  intensive, personalised job-search assistance
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  various types of vocational training, up-skilling and retraining measures
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  temporary incentives and allowances for the duration of the active measures
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  business creation support
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  mentoring
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  public employment schemes.

The report shows that half of the workers (14,333 out of 28,662) who participated in the 41 EGF initiatives already completed in previous years found new jobs or were self-employed at the end of the assistance period, and an additional 1,069 people were in education or training to increase their future employability.

The results in terms of re-integration into employment are encouraging, given the current difficult job situation, and considering that EGF supports workers in particularly difficult circumstances of mass lay-offs affecting a specific territory and that the supported workers are usually among those with greater difficulties in the labour market, such as lower-skilled or other disadvantaged jobseekers.