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How best to protect employees from negative effects of near- and offshore outsourcing is subject of this year’s UNI Europa ICT Forum. Following the MOOS project, the over 80 participants at the ICT Forum held on 22-24 September in Prague, Czech Republic, discuss the possibility of developing a standard for an outsourcing procedure that would take into account economic, social and environmental aspects.

The ICT Forum also addresses the role of near shoring, in particular between old and new EU Member States.

Antonin Knetl, President of Czech UNI affiliate Project, welcomed participants to the beautiful city of Prague, the city that is supposed to have the highest agglomeration of historical buildings in Europe.

UNI Europa Regional Secretary Bernadette Segol criticised the decisions by the European Court of Justice, who ruled in several cases directly against the interests of employees and their trade unions.

UNI’s Lorenzo De Santis, Research Officer, presenting his background report offshoring and outsourcing said it was not at all a one way flow of work out of developed countries towards “low cost” destinations. Instead he said, the USA and Western European economies, closely followed by India, were the largest “insourcers”, what is to say that they sell more services than they buy.

Gerhard Rohde, Head of UNI IBITS, explained how a standard for offshore outsourcing could look like. He said that strict rules and principles need to be defined for each stage of the complex process of offshoring, including planning, decision making, implementation, evaluation, HR management, ethical implication and environmental sustainability. The Conference is expected to review the ideas and develop them further.

Bernhard Pfitzner of verdi, Germany, showed how the ICT sector in Old and New Member States have developed over the last couple of years. He explained that company size, turnover per employee and labour costs were much higher in the old Member States. On the other hand the growth of employment in ICT had developed markedly faster in the New Member States.

Monique Ramioul, Senior Researcher at the Royal University of Leuven in Belgium, explained that offshore outsourcing had to bee seen more as global sourcing, where companies position themselves as global players. She also said that this process involved efforts to standardise services. She said that today much of offshore outsourcing was still in manufacturing, but that in particular ICT services were rapidly picking up.

Donald Storrie, Head of the Dublin based European Monitoring Centre on Change (EMCC), said that the size of offshore outsourcing was often vastly over estimated, played up by press reports, and that no more than 8% of all job losses in Europe today, could be attributed to offshore outsourcing. He said that he nevertheless understood trade unions’ concern about this issue was sceptical about unions trying to stem the tide, rather he said that the way described by the MOOS Handbook would be the most reasonable strategy for trade unions to tackle offshore outsourcing.

The Conference will also define the role of information and consultation in the process of outsourcing and try to find an angle to better use outsourcing as a hook to organise and recruit new members.