Franco-German employment placement services
2017
Cross-border cooperation is a partnership between private or public players, separated by a State border, whose actions have repercussions at regional and local level on either side of the border. Within the European area, 360° mobility across the border, the projects and policies that accompany this mobility in territories close to the border, and the progressive cross-border integration that this cooperation builds and gives rise to cross-border territories, characterise different experiences. To illustrate the results of more than 20 years of cooperation within the Mission Opérationnelle Transfrontalière (MOT), 20 unique experiments conducted by MOT members for the benefit of the inhabitants of cross-border territories have been highlighted in various fields: here we look again at the employment sector through the example of a Franco-German project aimed at organizing the services of employment agencies in nearby conurbations located on both sides of the border.
Nearly 50,000 French people cross the Franco-German border every day to work in Germany, where the need for labour is high and set to grow over the coming decades. Unemployment figures show a contrasting employment situation: the Grand Est region has an unemployment rate of 9.8%, Rhineland-Palatinate only 4.9%, Saarland 6.8% and Baden-Württemberg enjoys a situation of almost full employment with only 3.4% unemployment.
Pôle Emploi and the German Federal Employment Agency are working to improve cross-border job placement: exchanges of vacancies and profiles, dissemination via the press and radio, organisation of recruitment meetings, joint participation in trade fairs, workshops at Pôle Emploi and in vocational colleges, mailing campaigns to employers, etc. This partnership led to a framework cooperation agreement, signed in February 2013, which has resulted in the creation of five cross-border job placement services located along the Franco-German border:
1. Strasbourg-Ortenau service, between the Strasbourg and Offenburg branches, created on 26 February 2013
2. Pamina service between the Haguenau, Wissembourg, Landau and Karlsruhe-Rastatt agencies, created on 20 September 2013
3. Service between the Haut-Rhin branches and those of Freiburg and Lörrach, created on 26 October 2013
4. Placement service between the Sarrebruck and Sarreguemines agencies, created on 15 November 2013.
With regard to the Strasbourg-Ortenau Eurodistrict job placement service, for example, the results for the first year show 600 French candidates registered and more than 3,000 German job offers published. Of these 600 candidates, more than 200 found a job thanks to the agency.