The European Commission published its sixth monitoring report in which it reviewed 18 projects in the fields of social protection and inclusion, employment, working conditions and European job mobility. These were funded under the EU Programme for Employment and Social Innovation (EaSI) and its predecessor programmes PROGRESS and EURES.

The aims of the projects varied from building partnerships between employment services, over promoting transnational cooperation on posting of workers to placing young people in quality jobs. Analysing project results is part of the EaSI performance monitoring.

This report will serve as guidance for

• public authorities of EU Member States,
• civil society organisations
• private actors

wishing to apply for EU funding and it will provide policy-makers with innovative ideas for social policy interventions.

Successful and inspiring projects - a sample

The project in the Rhône-Alpes region Economie verte – Un levier pour un emploi durable des personnes handicapés et des seniors secured work in the water, sanitation, waste and air sectors for seniors and workers with disabilities. Enabling a group with more difficulties to find work to a sector known for its potential high tech jobs is pretty innovative. 54 jobseekers were placed in work and 24 in training. Other concrete outcomes were, for instance, easy-to-read brochures and an e-learning platform.  

VALORG is another noteworthy project which focused on the recovery of organic waste and led to several results, such as improved sorting of green waste for energy recovery in Belgium, a new site for windrow composting in Spain or two recovery platforms for organic waste in France. In addition, VALORG developed three new job profiles along with professional guidelines, training programmes and teaching tools and tutorials. 29 supervisors and 169 people with low qualification levels were trained and some were offered long-term jobs.

FIT4Jobs, a model to upskill jobseekers and to connect them to employers first tried in Ireland, proved a best practice as it was successfully implemented in six other European countries. In Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain 264 jobseekers were offered free training and 165 were placed in employment. Over 200 employers were engaged in the project and contributed to the development of training curricula, and offered internships and permanent employment.

Background

This is the sixth report in the series, after the first, second, third, fourth and the fifth were published between 2014 and the beginning of 2017.