Participants Dub Global Jobs Conference a ‘First Step’ : Economy: First such G-7 meeting produces few lessons. Europeans show no willingness to end safety nets for unemployed.

Officials from the leading industrial democracies completed their first jobs conference Tuesday, agreeing on the need to improve education, training and worker skills to combat unemployment but failing to bridge a crucial gap between the United States and Europe.

European delegations showed no sign that they are willing to take the politically risky step of reducing their traditional, expensive support for social safety nets--which in many cases make a lifetime on government unemployment benefits more financially attractive than work on the lowest rung of the pay scale.

American officials could point to few specific lessons they learned in the day and a half of meetings in the heart of America’s Rust Belt that would shift Clinton Administration policies.

Yet the officials--from the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy--left here on an upbeat note.

They agreed in a final statement read by Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen that they had taken “an important first step, very frankly trading ideas, learning from one another” about what has worked, as they try to pull their nations out of the troubling unemployment that has dogged them even as other economic conditions begin to improve.

“We agreed that there is no single solution, no one idea or action that will work for every country,” Bentsen said.

From the start, officials went out of their way to portray the meeting as an informal discussion of the difficulty they have encountered in trying to bring down unemployment rates that have reached as high as nearly 12%, almost twice that in the United States.

At the heart of their common effort was the belief that growth in one nation can help fuel growth in the others. Thus, with modest goals, conference participants--ministers of finance, economics, commerce and labor or their deputies--could proclaim the meeting a success; they emerged from their private sessions citing support they had gained for existing policy goals.

They said the Cabinet-level meeting had placed the question of providing jobs firmly on the agenda of the heads of government of the Group of Seven nations. They are to meet next in Naples, Italy, this summer.

Bentsen said the officials could “tell where they blew it” in some programs and mentioned one country, which he did not identify, that confessed mistakes in funding an early retirement program.

As for specific lessons learned, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, chairwoman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, said she wants to study further a French program that helps the unemployed start small businesses. She also expressed interest in a Japanese program that helps companies maintain work forces during dire economic times. “That’s something the United States should look at,” she said.

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich said European nations have “developed some restrictions on the ability of individual nations to lure jobs, lure factories” from their neighbors. This, he said, may offer valuable lessons for America, where states offer lower taxes and other enticements to lure companies from their neighbors--thereby raising unemployment in those states.

But at the center of the conference were the different approaches that have developed in America, Canada, Europe and Japan to employment questions:

* In the United States, and to some degree in Canada, workplace “flexibility”--economists’ code word to denote a lack of rules prohibiting companies from firing workers and moving operations--is seen as a key difference from Europe, where ossified job rules protect workers at the expense of business.

* European nations offer an extensive network of social services that protect unemployed workers, train high school students for factory jobs and provide enviable health and vacation benefits compared to those generally available in America. These benefits set European workers, businesses and governments apart from the United States--and have been blamed for making the cost of creating jobs and hiring workers to fill them increasingly expensive. To shift from this course, said Lawrence Katz, the Labor Department’s chief economist, “is a very big psychological change.”

Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown said there was disagreement over the correct government role in providing such services and “whether or not existing plans are impediments or not to the flexibility of job creation.”

America is “far more flexible and resilient” in private companies’ abilities to shift in response to economic trends, Reich said, “but in terms of investment in human capital (social service and worker training programs), we lag behind.”