The main measures of this plan are: complete opening up of labour markets, both private and public, to all European citizens – including Romanians and Bulgarians – “appropriate minimum wages” that will let employees live off their labour, mutual recognition of degrees, and lower labour taxes.

The Commission hopes the most potential lies in the health sectors, services for the elderly, development of a sustainable climate-friendly economy, and in IT, though it remains to be seen whether states will allow interference in their social affairs. The plan will be discussed at the EU summit in June.

Germany, with a rate of 5.7% of unemployed seems like a jobs paradise (only the Netherlands, Austria and Luxemburg have lower rates). As German daily Die Welt puts in in a headline, "Berlin is advertising to Europeans" to attract labour.

Some regions and some sectors in Germany are in a full employment situation and are urgently seeking German-speaking, foreign workers. A migration expert quoted by the paper, however, warns that expectations should not be too high. "Germany is not a first choice for skilled labour, it is in competition with other States," he says. This concerns for example English-speaking academics who are more likely to seek work in Great Britain. Berlin is not expecting a massive assault of Greek and Spanish unemployed, Die Welt concludes.

Even if, like any top-down imposed regulation, they seem artificial, no one has yet come up with a more efficient way of boosting women’s representation at the top echelons of corporate power.

In Poland, women constitute only 11 percent of listed companies’ board members and their salaries are an average 15 percent lower than those of men in comparable positions. EU-wide, women earn 16.4 percent less for the same work as their male colleagues.

In the male bastion of Germany where the female quota became a talking point last week after 350 woman journalists petitioned for a better representation in leading positions on the national press, the Süddeutsche Zeitung believes that “the gentlemen ignored for too long the soft pressure of the ladies to put women in more executive positions” –

One can trust Viviane Reding [European Commissioner for Justice who initiated the project] to succeed. [...] Not by referring to discrimination or equality but by using the argument of the internal market: without a European quota it could happen that German companies, for example, could not participate in French or Spanish tenders because they don’t have enough female executives.

And Friday’s publication of European Commission estimates for the eurozone will likely confirm the extent of this disparity.” The Paris business daily continues:

This European dichotomy is first and foremost a reflection of the state of the continent’s economies. While some countries have sunk into recession (Greece, Portugal, Spain), others have succeeded in maintaining growth, albeit modest.

Citing reforms undertaken before the crisis as one of the reasons for the healthier economies in the North, The Financial Times remarks that changes to labour legislation in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany-

... have helped make the workers of these countries internationally competitive – a factor which is sorely lacking in the eurozone periphery.

The City of London daily also highlights the role played by these countries’ strong tradition of exports in sectors that “benefited from the rapid recovery of emerging economies after the 2009 crisis.” Finally, specific employment policies, like the one in operation in Germany, which encourages partial unemployment as an alternative to layoffs, have also had an impact.

However, Tageszeitung takes issue with this argument, and notes that the reforms undertaken by Berlin have not created new jobs, but simply redistributed them to a larger number of workers – a process that has resulted in the creation of a new low-pay sector. Reporting that 8.4 million Germans are “under-employed,” TAZ  recalls that economic inequality in Germany has grown more rapidly than in other industrialised countries.

Finally, the newspaper notes that to celebrate the record of 41 million wage earners, the German government has spent 330,000 euros on a poster campaign “Danke Deutschland – Wirtschaft. Wachstum. Wohlstand.” [“Thank you Germany – Economy. Growth. Prosperity”].

"It's a start and not a bad start at all," the paper says, stressing that it is the middle classes, those that risk becoming the educated poor of the future, who are demanding a simple principle: the economy must exist to serve humanity, not vice-versa. "In the meantime, this protest can be understood as a sign that the damage caused by the crises of capitalism can no longer be kept quiet. The quake of the markets has destroyed the Potemkin villages that the [political elite] think they are still managing," it says. In Italy, tens of thousands of people marched through Rome, before the demonstration broke down when small groups set fire to cars and police vans and smashed stores. This stole the headlines away from the real reasons for the march, Italian daily La Stampa says. Some 135 people were injured (including 105 police officers), according to daily La Repubblica which estimated the damage at €2 million.

The conservative daily writes that “Brussels and the [Spanish] government agree on the timing of the decision to restore” what the Commission calls a “normal labour market” in Spain. The Romanian community in Spain has more than 860,000 residents, attracted in recent years by Spain’s economic boom. Today, with an unemployment rate of 21 percent – 30 percent among Romanian workers – Madrid needed a free hand from the EU “to cut back on one of the fundamental freedoms of the European treaties: freedom of movement”, and, what’s more, “during the summer, which sees thousands of temporary Romanian workers come to the Spanish countryside.” The restrictions will not apply to Romanian workers already resident in Spain, even if they are unemployed, La Razón concludes.

The idea of ​​a system of social solidarity to redistribute agricultural surpluses as food aid to the poor was brought in (in the winter of 1986-87) by Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission. (...) But in the last ten years, food surpluses have fallen. The contributions that had come from surpluses were then replaced by direct financial contributions to charities. One percent of CAP financing – that is, 500 million euros – was to finance the European Programme of Food Aid to the Most Deprived Persons (PEAD). Some countries, like Germany and Sweden, turned to the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), arguing that this amount was purely social assistance unrelated to the CAP.

On April 12 the Court agreed with them by annulling the right to award a portion of the CAP budget for food distribution through charities. The Commission has not appealed. According to the latest study of the impact of the PEAD, more than 13 million people in Europe benefited from the programme in 2006, a year in which the number of people at risk of food poverty was estimated at 43 million in the EU of twenty-five states.

On the contrary, underlines La Stampa, young Italian "Neets" (i.e. Not in Education, Employment or Training) have reached a disturbing 11.2 per cent, compared to an European average of 3.4. But a barren occupational landscape is not a sufficient explanation: in Spain, where youth unemployment is over 40 per cent, only 0.5 per cent gave up looking for work. In Italy, however, "[m]any young people have accepted inactivity as a possible way of life, and the social security net provided by families does not help them overcome their apathy". Holding a degree makes finding a job even harder, so it's not surprising that only 20.7 per cent of Italians complete university studies (EU average is 33). In this context, the dwindling of Italy’s young population could eventually be positive thing for employment: "By 2020, 8 million elders will exit labour market, and there are hardly enough youngsters to substitute them".

In 2007, Latvia was the only country in the EU 27 with a worse showing, while Romania and Bulgaria were on a par with Portugal. At the other extreme, the Nordic countries, Slovenia and Slovakia proved the most egalitarian.