Towards a European Job Guarantee

Join us for this session of the 2025 Spring Semester, with Rania Antonopoulos, Senior Scholar and Program Director at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, on Wednesday, February 19, 5-6pm in the Levy Conference Room at Blithewood, or on Zoom. Dr. Antonopoulos’ presentation will be followed by an open Q&A session with audience members—both those in person and on Zoom are welcome to ask questions. This event is moderated by Levy Institute President Pavlina R. Tcherneva and co-sponsored by the Economic Democracy Initiative.

Long-term unemployment affects not only those seeking but unable to find jobs, but their households and communities, as well, and, if widespread, it also has negative impacts on the growth and stability prospects of an economy. This is recognized by policy makers as a stubborn challenge, confronting many countries around the world, including the Member States of the European Union. In the search for remedial action, the idea of an EU-wide Job Guarantee (EU-JG) has gained currency in recent times among a wide range of European constituencies as an important policy innovation, including the European Trade Union Confederation.

In this presentation, Dr. Antonopoulos will first explore, through facts and statistical evidence, the state of play with regard to long-term unemployment in the EU context. Subsequently, she will discuss what a job guarantee policy is; the EU’s experience with job guarantee initiatives and other direct job creation programs that are currently being implemented; the principles that ought to be observed should a JG be adopted at the EU level; and how an EU-JG might be financed. In the final section of her talk, Antonopoulos will highlight several dimensions of JG which are particularly important from a gender perspective.

The presentation is based on a recently published report (January 2025) by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) so as to provide further support in deliberations and debate about the efficacy, if not the imperative, of a European-wide Job Guarantee (see https://www.etui.org/publications/towards-european-job-guarantee); and on previously undertaken work for the United Nations, “Employment Guarantee Policies: A Gender Perspective”, Poverty Reduction and Gender Equality series, Policy Brief #2, UNDP Series, April 2010 as well as on the findings of a research project “The Impact of Public Employment Guarantee Strategies on Gender Equality and pro-poor economic development: South Africa, Scaling up the Expanded Public Works Programme- A Social Sector Intervention Proposal,” collaboratively by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Levy Economics Institute, 2008.

Beginning in 2015, Senior Scholar Rania Antonopoulos served as alternate minister of labour in Greece, member of parliament, and, more recently, ambassador for Greece at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Her professional experience includes appointments at the UN-Women’s headquarters as a macroeconomic policy advisor; expert advisor to various United Nations organizations; senior scholar and director of the Institute’s Gender Equality and the Economy program; and professor of economics at New York University amongst other academic appointments. Her policy-oriented research and advocacy has focused on the macroeconomic results of job guarantee policies and their implications for economic recovery, gender equality, and poverty reduction, and on the construction of a new poverty indicator that highlights the importance of time-use in estimates of poverty and inequality. She has published extensively on these topics. ​