The article focuses on two key aspects of the trouble European countries are copying with the growing mass unemployment and welfare state crisis: first, the need to redifine both the concepts of «right to work» and «social citizenship»; second, the need to adopt the same point of view for a correct understanding of both the employment and welfare crisis. Paying tomorrow pensions to young jobless people — the Author underlines — is a national product problem rather of a legal rights one. As the best remedy is increas-ing the output, European countries can reduce working time to create new jobs only if the gross product increases. But the correct solution — the Au-thor maíntains — would lays in new big goals for Europe