Europeans Go Back To Work

A decade of labor reform is finally paying off, but now the politicians want to turn back the clock.

FLASHBACK TO WESTERN EUROPE, CIRCA 1994. IT’S THE ERA OF “EUROSCLEROSIS”—a chronic malaise of anemic growth, high unemployment and a political class in deep denial about the continent’s problems. The EU’s official jobless rate was 10.5 percent, versus only 6.1 percent in the United States and 2.9 percent in Japan. The “official” numbers didn’t even include tens of millions of Europeans who’d dropped out of the work force

altogether, or were sloshing around in the continent’s vast labyrinth of government make-work and often useless re-education programs. In its 1994 Jobs Report, an alarmed OECD warned that Europe’s mass unemployment threatened to “unravel the social fabric [and undermine] the authority of the democratic ...