The Vice-Lehendakari encourages people to break out of inertia and dare to innovate in order to generate quality jobs in the face of major transitions

• Idoia Mendia warns that those who do not invest in human capital will be left out of the competitiveness process

• “Our Great Decision is to make people’s training a right”

The Vice-Lehendakari and Minister of Labour and Employment of the Basque Government, Idoia Mendia, has called on all institutional, social and economic agents to “break out of inertia and dare to innovate”, and has warned that those who do not invest in human capital will be left out of competitiveness in the face of the major transitions we are going through. In this sense, he confirmed that the “Great Decision” taken by his Department is to ensure that the training of people to adapt to these economic changes becomes a right.

The Vice-Lehendakari’s speech was made at the opening ceremony of the WORKINLan Summit being held at the Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao, organised by the Department and the Iseak Foundation, which began with a welcome address by the Mayor of Bilbao, Juan María Aburto. The institutional event was attended by the Commissioner for Employment and Social Rights, Nicolas Schmit and the three Vice-Presidents of the Spanish Government: Nadia Calviño, Yolanda Díaz and Teresa Ribera. It was attended by 600 people representing all scientific, academic, economic and social fields, including the Nobel Prize for Economics David Card, and the director of the Iseak Foundation, Sara de la Rica, the organisation that designed the meeting and author of the White Paper on Employment in the Basque Country, which is being presented at these sessions.

Idoia Mendia stressed that this Summit is a multiple challenge for all the participating persons or entities, as well as the vocation to “go beyond the walls” of the Euskalduna Conference Centre to try to reach all citizens, because everyone without exception is concerned by the challenges for employment in the face of the great transitions we are living through.

Daring to innovate

These transitions, she said, cannot be tackled only with “patches”, but require “daring to innovate” and with “shared and aligned responses”. We share a navigational chart with a fixed destination and a steady course. To weather the storms that will continue to batter us, but where the institutions and the social and economic agents cannot be mere managers of the times. Administrations, from the public sector, must be the guarantee of cohesion and the drivers of transformation. And we need to ally ourselves with private and social agents. These are times of difficulties and only together, aligned, can we change them into opportunities, without anyone, any company, any person being left behind,” she explained.

The Vice-Lehendakari warned that the decisions that are taken now and those that are not taken will define “the employment that we want for the Basque Country that we will be.” In this regard, she confirmed that, from her Department, the next Employment Law will innovate by generating a new right, so that all people, whether unemployed or employed, are guaranteed by the public service to have their training updated, so that no one is left behind in the face of these great transformations. “Because it is here, in investment in human capital, where the game of competitiveness of countries will be played. All major transitions require major investments in new technologies, but above all major investments in people, in the quality of their jobs. This is going to be the differentiating factor and it is the firm commitment of the Basque Government's Department of Labour and Employment,” she pointed out.

For this reason, Idoia Mendia called on all participants to move away from prejudices and take risks with new public policies that have not been tried before, with a new business and trade union culture, with new attitudes for the times to come. Times in which those who do not dare to innovate, those who stick to old recipes, will be stranded.  And this is something we cannot afford,” she concluded.