European Leaders Huddle on Youth Unemployment

PARIS — President François Hollande of France called Tuesday for “urgent action” to tackle alarmingly high rates of youth unemployment across the European Union, saying that mounting disillusionment among the “post-crisis generation” threatened the very future of the European project.

“We need to act quickly,” Mr. Hollande told a gathering of government officials, business leaders and students in Paris. “In this battle, time is the decisive factor.”

Mr. Hollande spoke ahead of a series of meetings between French and German officials this week in preparation for a summit meeting of European leaders at the end of June, where youth unemployment is expected to top the agenda. The subject is also expected to figure prominently at a meeting here Thursday between Mr. Hollande and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Nearly six million people under the age of 25 are unemployed across the European Union — nearly one quarter of the total, according to Eurostat, the Union’s statistical office. Youth jobless rates are now roughly twice the national average in many of the Union’s 27 member states, with the figures reaching as high as 60 percent in countries like Greece and Spain, which have been hard hit by austerity-driven cuts to social services and other benefits.

Economists say the extraordinarily high rates are in part a result of the general economic slump across the region, but are also a consequence of inflexible labor market rules that make entry into the work force particularly difficult for young people.

In recent weeks, German officials have spearheaded a series of bilateral agreements with countries like Spain and Portugal aimed at helping more young people from those countries enter the work force or to receive vocational training. Discussions about a similar agreement with France are continuing, people with knowledge of the talks said.

Those agreements, while still short on details, are being seen as part of a broader blueprint for a pan-European plan to create jobs and apprenticeships for young people across the Union.

Mr. Hollande said Tuesday that the plan would rest on three pillars: easing the access to credit for small and midsize companies; developing new job-training and apprenticeship programs; and increasing the geographic mobility of young people by offering money for language training and moving costs.

Initial financing for the plan would come from a pool of roughly €6 billion, or $7.7 billion, that has already been earmarked for this purpose from the European Investment Bank.

The European youth jobs initiative is expected to be ready in time for a gathering of the Union’s ministers July 3 in Berlin.

Mr. Hollande’s call to action was echoed by other European officials in attendance at the conference, which was held before a packed hall of university students from France’s prestigious Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, or Sciences Po.

“We have to rescue an entire generation of young people who are scared,” said Enrico Giovannini, Italy’s new labor minister. “We have the best-educated generation and we are putting them on hold. This is not acceptable.”

Joblessness among those aged 15 to 24 in Italy is above 38 percent, according to Eurostat, on par with the rate in Portugal, which has also adopted wrenching changes. Youth unemployment is much lower in Germany and Austria, below 8 percent in both cases, a reflection both of their stronger economies as well as their centuries-old apprenticeship systems, which offer paid vocational training to students while they are still in high school.

Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s labor minister, emphasized the need to bring to bear the resources of the European Investment Bank, based in Luxembourg, to encourage companies to invest and create jobs.

“Many small and mid-sized companies, which are the backbone of our economies, are ready to deliver, but they need capital,” Ms. von der Leyen said, noting that small firms still faced “exorbitant” interest rates from private-sector banks that remain reluctant to lend. “We want to break this vicious circle,” she said.

Werner Heyer, head of the European Investment Bank, said the deepening youth unemployment crisis, alongside obstacles to cross-border lending within the euro zone, represented the region’s two “megaproblems.” But he cautioned that politicians would be mistaken if they believed that the European bank’s resources alone would be enough to solve the unemployment problem.

“Such expectations of the bank are beyond the horizon,” Mr. Heyer said. “There is no quick fix; there is no grand plan.”

Germany Works to Curb European Youth Unemployment

Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, and Vítor Gaspar, his counterpart in Portugal, announced a plan on Wednesday to use the German state development bank to help set up a financial institution to assist Portuguese under age 25 in getting jobs or job training.

This week, Ursula von der Leyen, the German labor minister, signed an agreement with her Spanish counterpart, Fátima Báñez García, that foresees bringing thousands of young Spaniards to Germany for apprenticeships. At the same time, Germany will seek to help Spain build a dual-track vocational system in which young people earn qualifications through a combination of work and study.

The initiatives are part of a multipronged effort by Berlin to quickly get more young people into the work force, a move that experts say is crucial if a unified Europe is to survive into the next generation. “What is decisive is that we must be faster and more definitive in fighting youth unemployment,” Mr. Schäuble said.

More than 5.6 million people under 25 are without work across the union, according to figures released by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. Among the countries with the largest number of young people out of work are the weaker members of the euro zone that are undergoing deep cuts to social services and other structural changes, part of efforts to recover from the debt crisis.

Germany grappled with its own youth unemployment problem early last decade. While its numbers then were nowhere near the 60 percent of young people now out of work in Greece, or the nearly 56 percent in Spain, German leaders said their experience could be of value to their European partners.

Next week, German and French officials plan to draw up a bilateral agreement on employment when they meet alongside European business leaders at a conference in Paris. On July 3, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany will gather labor ministers and the heads of 27 European Union labor agencies in Berlin for a meeting to further discuss the problem.

Details of the German-French proposal remain vague, but Mr. Schäuble insisted that financing would not be an issue.

He cited the 6 billion euros, or $7.8 billion, that the European Union has earmarked in its new budget for addressing the problem, as well as additional money that was given to the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg intended for loans to small and midsize businesses, which would help create more jobs.

“We are working to use the existing funds more efficiently,” Mr. Schäuble said in Berlin.

Unemployment in the early stages of a person’s career damages the ability to integrate into society, or, in the case of the union, to later support the idea of more integration on the Continent, said Joachim Möller, director of the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg. “The long-term effects reach far beyond the working world,” he added. “It could be catastrophic for their idea of Europe.”

Attorney Uses Yoga to Help Troubled Youth

A Grounded for Good yoga class at the Covenant House.
Photo courtesy of Robert Altman

It is no stretch to say that yoga has changed attorney Robert Altman's life for the better. Now, he's using it to help others.

Altman is a co-founder of Grounded for Good, a not-for-profit service project for abused, homeless and at-risk children at the Covenant House in southeast Atlanta.

The idea, he says, is that "yoga and mindfulness training could be a wonderful resource to calm, focus and heal young people who are facing the trauma and stress associated with abuse and homelessness."

Altman has been on a path of helping people for some time.

He did legal work early in his career representing Native Americans who had been prosecuted by the federal government for taking over a reservation in Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973.

Altman moved to Atlanta in 1976 to work with Millard Farmer and Morris Dees in a project called Team Defense. "We went around the South representing mostly poor black defendants against whom prosecutors were seeking the death penalty in murder cases," he said.

He became the head of the federal public defender office for the Northern District of Georgia in 1980 and entered private practice four years later.

"In 2007," he said, "after more than 30 years as a litigator, I began winding down my practice to the point where I now spend most of my time working on my volunteer activity, traveling and exercising to stay healthy. I only handle a few selected cases that I take from time to time."

He talked to the Daily Report about his career and his new yoga service project, beginning with an obvious question.

Robert Altman?

The most it's ever got me was a table at a restaurant. The hostess asked me, "Are you the Robert Altman?" I said, "Well, I'm a Robert Altman."

She said, "We're full but I love his movies, so I'll find you a table."

When did you start doing yoga?

I started a yoga practice at the time I began winding down my law practice in 2007. I had a lot more time to enjoy activities like traveling, cycling, running and yoga.

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