| Abstract [eng] |
The European Union has always had and still has an innumerable impact on the lives of the EU citizens, since the beginning of the European Economic Community. The EU policies regulate a wide range of areas, including agriculture, competition, environment, home affairs, foreign and security policy, justice and trade. Every year, the EU population is growing, which means new challenges and difficulties. The most of the EU citizens see weaknesses in today’s labour market. Highly qualified workers leave their home countries, search for better living conditions in other EU countries, as well as share jobs with highly qualified workers from non-EU countries. Accordingly to this, emigration and immigration continues to be extremely important processes in the European Union. An aging population and depopulation highlights the need of the recruitment of highly qualified workers from outside the EU. Importance of highly qualified workers became widely discussed, when the beginning of the 21st century brought a lack of such workers in the European Union. The EU labour market has a lot of international competitors, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand whose labour markets to this day are still more attractive than the European Union, because of high employment and low unemployment rates, also initiatives that attracts highly qualified workers to those countries. In order to remain competitive, to increase the attractiveness and encourage mobility of highly qualified workers in the EU and from non-EU countries, the European Union has to pursue a variety of initiatives at national level of the Member States and at the EU level in general. With support of these initiatives all necessary opportunities for the EU citizens to move freely within the labour market are provided and it increases the attractiveness of the EU labour market among the highly qualified workers from non-EU countries. Structure: 1. The first chapter of this work ‘General labour market conditions in the European Union and its international competitors’ contains information about the EU labour market in an international perspective, its current situation and future strategies and international competitors of the EU labour market and their labour policies. 2. The second chapter of this work ‘Highly qualified workers movement and recruitment initiatives in the European Union’ examines the labour mobility within the EU and the importance of the highly qualified workers immigration into the EU from non-EU countries. 3. The third chapter of this work ‘Mobility of highly qualified workers within the EU and from non-EU countries: situation and recruitment initiatives empirical research’ gives the evaluation of the situation in the EU labour market and discusses of initiatives for labour mobility of highly qualified workers within the EU and from non-EU countries. Descriptive, interpretative and comparative methods of research were used in this paper. The results of the research. Literature review revealed that employment is one of the main issues in the European Union policy making. To get a job becomes an issue, when many parts of Europe face high rates of unemployment. Highly qualified workers are the most valuable workforce in today’s world. The global competition of countries for leadership, economic growth, growing need of highly qualified work force, makes rich countries to create the international recruitment strategies to attract and hire highly qualified workers from abroad. The right of free movement of persons is very important for the European Union and it is kept to be one of the best accomplishments of the EU. Labour mobility helps to solve problems related to skill gaps and labour shortages. The initiatives for attracting highly qualified workers to the EU are carried out in two ways: at national level of Member States and at general level of the EU. Every year thousands of people are leaving their home countries in order to find a better life in other European Union Member States. With the years the number is increasing. Thus the EU Mobility directive could be evaluated as bringing benefits, yet with a room for improvement, because highly qualified workers still make just a small part in all the mobile citizens’ population. 67 994 National permits were issued to highly qualified workers from non-EU countries in 2013-2014, and on the same year, 26 816 EU Blue Cards were issued. The most popular destinations were Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and France. The empirical research showed that National initiatives are more effective in fostering the mobility of highly qualified workers, but this has the threat of unequal benefits in different EU regions; the EU Blue Card initiative effectiveness is weak but with high potential, thus needs further improvements in its issuing policies. |
