Community Initiatives are one part of implementing European Employment Strategy in the European Union’s member countries. By the example of the EQUAL-Project „INCLUSION - Integration-Network for Migrants in the Federal State of Brandenburg“, this article critically examines what results such projects can achieve. Following ADAPT and EMPLOYMENT, the initiative EQUAL started in 2001 with the stated mission to promote social integration in working life through fighting against discrimination and exclusion.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the impact of European Employment Strategy (EES) on social partnership at national level. Increasing the participation of trade unions, employer organisations and other social partners in policy formulation and implementation is one of the EES objectives. A comparative study has been conducted on Ireland and Greece in order to analyse to what extent this objective has been achieved through EES, which is an Open Method of Coordination. Historical institutionalism provides the theoretical framework for this thesis. The impact of EES is demonstrated at two levels. First level change indicates change in discourse. Second level shows change in social partners

This thesis treats of importance of education for the success on the labour market. It is aimed at retraining financed from resources of the active employment policy and at retraining courses and educational activities within the frame of projects of the European Social Fund in the region Vysocina. In the first part I define the conception of the human capital and I mention economists who dealt with the theory of the human capital. The second chapter is applied to the employment policy in the European Union and the Czech Republic. In more detail I describe the Amsterodam Treaty, the European Employment Strategy, the Lisbon Strategy and the results assessment of these strategies. The employment law regulates the employment policy in the Czech Republic. The National System of Qualifications is placed in this part too. In the third chapter I analyse the educational structure of population of the Czech Republic and the region Vysocina. In the following chapter I attend to resources of the financing of retraining which are the state budget and the European Social Fund. In the last chapter I am engaged in retraining in the region Vysocina and I analyse it in various terms.

La stratégie européenne pour l’emploi, adoptée en 1997, organise une coordination des politiquesnationales de l’emploi autour d’objectifs communs. La méthode initiale reposait sur l’apprentissagemutuel et la pression par les pairs. Elle a récemment évolué vers une forme de gouvernance pluscontraignante.Cette thèse porte sur les usages de cette stratégie en Wallonie. Elle décrit les effets procédurauxet cognitifs de la SEE et analyse les comportements et stratégies des acteurs. Enfin, elle met enévidence les changements effectifs des politiques de l’emploi qui peuvent être associés à cettestratégie. / The European Employment Strategy has been adopted in 1997. It organizes a coordination ofnational employment policies around common European objectives. The initial method was basedon mutual learning and peer pressure but it has recently moved towards a more binding form ofgovernance.This thesis focuses on the uses of this strategy in Wallonia. It describes the procedural andcognitive effects of the EES and analyzes the strategies of the social and political actors involved inemployment policies. Finally, it highlights the effective changes in employment policies that can beassociated with this strategy.

The European Employment Strategy (EES) belongs to the European Union’s „softer“, legally non-binding policy instruments. Many politicians and academics associated its introduction with the expectation for a strengthening of the EU’s social dimension and democratic quality. This article examines whether, so far, the EES can be regarded as effective and legitimate. To illustrate this, the author briefly examines the role of the EES for the development of labour market policy in Germany and the UK.

The diploma thesis "The Labour Market in the European Union" evaluates the developments of the labour market in the European Union and the mechanisms of the European Union's employment policy in the period of 2000-2010. The theoretical definitions of the main labour market categories and three major macroeconomic models are explained in the first chapter. The second part provides comparative analysis of them member states based on selected labour market indicators -- employment, unemployment, labour productivity and costs and labour market policy The third chapter investigates in the activities of the European Union in the area of employment policy and more closely focuses on the European Employment Strategy, its guidelines and influence on member states policy setting. The chapter closes with the overview of the financial resources activated by the EU to support employment in response to the financial crisis.

This research project seeks to gauge the autonomous power of the European Commission within the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), a new mode of governance coined at the Lisbon European Council in March 2000 and based on the principle of the voluntary cooperation of Member States. Two cases form the basis of this inquiry, namely, quality in work, a policy issue addressed under the banner of the European Employment Strategy, and child poverty and social exclusion, a key item on the agenda of the OMC for Social Inclusion. A primary impetus at the heart of this project is one of ontological pluralism. Rejecting a zero-sum interpretation of the rationalist/constructivist debate, this study constitutes a plea for a conversation across paradigms. The domain-of-application model employed here works by preserving the integrity of individual theories while specifying a particular scope condition under which constructivist and rationalist insights are likely to prevail. Selecting two cases on the basis of the critical scope condition of issue sensitivity, a central postulate informing this integrative research design is that high issue sensitivity (quality in work) invites strategic interaction among pre-constituted social actors driven by a behavioural logic of utility-maximization, while low issue sensitivity (child poverty and social exclusion) allows for a fundamentally norm-guided behaviour. Concretely, in effecting this theoretical dialogue, two sets of causal hypotheses are examined. On the one hand, rational choice institutionalism (principal-agent theory) offers a number of suppositions about the Commission’s institutional power, that is, its ability to transform the conditions of action of self-seeking national governments. On the other hand, sociological institutionalism conceptualizes the Commission’s productive power (i.e. its power to constitute the interests and identities of individual agents) through the lens of discourse analysis. Testing theoretical predictions against collected data makes plain the superior explanatory value of independent variables and causal mechanisms of rationalist lineage in capturing the essence of the Commission’s autonomous power in the case of quality in work and the congruity of sociological institutionalism’s original conjectures in the area of child poverty and social exclusion. Crucially, this strict correspondence corroborates the pertinence of the critical scope condition of issue sensitivity in delineating the explanatory ambit of both theories and attests to the co-existence of different forms of autonomous power wielded by the Commission within the framework of the OMC.

This research focuses on an issue that has persisted in Greece over recent decades – long-term youth unemployment. The issue has worsened in the last few years, however, in particular following unprecedented historical times caused by a worldwide economic recession that hit Greece particularly hard. This recession that was triggered by events in the United States in 2008, set off a worldwide recession, the effects of which continue to affect countries like Greece today. It is in this context that the post-secondary graduate unemployment rate in the country soared to 20% in 2010 and has since continued to follow an upward trend. What is more, the Greek economy, with debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio reaching more than 140% in 2010 and 165% in 2011, is not showing signs of improvement. This situation is far from encouraging for unemployed Greek youth. Grounded theory (GT) methodology is undertaken in this study which borrows from both Glaserian and Straussian GT method approaches. A Constructivist Grounded Theory perspective is used to interpret findings as the thesis analyses barriers to employment, understandings and coping mechanisms in relation to Greek graduate unemployment and identifies prospects for the future. Six participants were recruited through convenience sampling and informed research through in depth interviews. Unemployed post-secondary graduates interviewed in this study offered uniquely grounded data to inform my analysis and shared timely information amidst the challenging context of the Greek fiscal crisis. The situation has gained much international attention and opened the door for re-thinking and new possibilities. Given that the economic situation in the Eurozone is inextricably linked to the conditions in its member states, this study considers employment policy in both Greece and the European Union (EU). The thesis concludes by suggesting some potential areas for further research. / Graduate

The Master thesis "The Impact of Europeanization on Social Systems of the EU Member States: The Case of the Swedish Labour Market" elaborates on the potential influence of the EU on the social policy of its members. Although the social policy has formally been left in the competences of national states, there are certain possible ways whereby the EU can affect it. The instruments of Europeanization in the social area are identified and then tested on the case of the Swedish labour market. On the one hand, there are direct instruments of Europeanization in the social policy represented by the Open method of coordination (OMC) which is an unbinding EU legislation, and on the other hand, there are indirect mechanisms proceeding by the application of the rules of the internal EU market. Concerning specifically the Swedish labour market, it could have been affected by the Swedish participation on the European Employment Strategy (EES) that is based on the OMC, or through the ECJ decision in the Laval case which dealt with the freedom to provide services. In this respect, the specific Swedish model of labour market has played an important role. It is characterised by traditionally strong position of social partners and collective agreements as well as by the highly developed active labour market policy....

The purpose of this diploma thesis is to describe the influence of the European Union and especially the European employment strategy on the active employment policy in the Czech Republic. The thesis follows the development of the employment policy in both European Union and the Czech Republic. One part of the thesis is devoted to the pre-accession period and the other is concerned with the period after the Czech Republic has become a valid member of the EU. There were applied two theoretical concepts in the analysis of the European Union's influence on the Czech employment policy: social network theory and the concept of policy transfer. There are pointed out the changes that happened in both periods. The motivation of both parties to accept and implement the changes and to influence or to be influenced is described. The aim of this thesis is to prove that the Czech Republic has been influenced and to show the aspects of the influence: where, why and by whom.