News

UNI Europa has submitted a response to the public consultation on the “Green Paper: Restructuring and anticipation of change: what lessons from recent experience?”. UNI Europa points out that it is not only the manufacturing sectors which need solutions but the service sectors are just as badly hit by the crisis. The Commission’s Green Paper focuses very much on the manufacturing sectors, taking up possible solutions and scenarios that would simply not fit the working conditions in the services sector.

UNI Europa fully supports and shares ETUC’s positions which can be found at

http://www.etuc.org/IMG/pdf/10-EN-Anticipating-change-and-restructuring.pdf.

ETUC and UNI Europa are very concerned about the Commission not launching a 2^nd stage social partner consultation as previously announced, but instead publishing a Green Paper, open to public consultation, and starting the discussion about European action from scratch rather than building on work undertaken since the first social partner consultation in 2002. This means in fact slowing down the process of finding solutions and of finally taking action.

The private services sector is particularly suffering from the crisis. The Austerity measures that are currently being implemented in Europe significantly touch upon the purchasing power of the people living in Europe. They thus cause lower demand for services to be provided, consequently damaging business in service sectors. Within UNI Europa sectors, we see most clearly that reduced purchasing power has direct consequences, for example on the Commerce sector.

The Finance sector is at the hub of the current crisis – which has developed from a purely financial into an economic and further into political and social crisis. To prevent more damage to be done within this key sector, and to protect employees in banking and insurance from carrying the entire burden of the crisis’ consequences (including restructuring processes), UNI Finance has repeatedly asked for the better training, a protection for whistle-blowing, the disconnection of salaries to sales budgets, etc. to be integrated in the relevant regulatory measures. UNI Europa also makes it clear that temporary work must never serve as a substitute for high quality full-time employment and must never serve to undermine collective agreements.



The Green Paper states that “Employees’ representatives should be open to negotiating flexible solutions alternative to redundancies.” Seeing the reality of EWCs, this statement has to be considered as cynical. For many years, The European trade union federations and EWCs have encountered the strongest resistance from company managements when it comes to actually listening and seriously considering the viewpoints of employees – with some positive exceptions confirming the rule. Employees and their representatives will be open to anticipating and managing change together with the employer – it is just as much in their own interest. But they need to know that the management is open to more creative solutions than redundancies and cost cutting.



UNI Europa follows the ETUC in its response this consultation.

The ETUC considers the following 5 elements key to EU action on the anticipation and management of change and restructuring:

1. Preparing and enabling workers: key role of education and training;

2. Maintaining and creating jobs: key role of industrial policy;

3. Giving workers a voice and place in strategic decisions: key role for information, consultation and participation;

4. Ensuring a European legal framework: key role of collective bargaining;

5. Providing a safety net: key role for active labour market policies, social protection and support measures.

More info:

http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?langId=en&catId=699&consultId=9&furtherConsult=yes