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UNI Europa, together with the social partners Insurance Europe, BIPAR and AMICE, is hosting a conference in Bucharest entitled ‘The demographic challenge revisited: Innovative measures in the European insurance sector’.

What better moment to present a new collection of successful initiatives that promote workers’ wellbeing and innovative solutions to the challenges the fast-changing insurance sector is facing. It is a follow-up — with a particular focus on central and eastern Europe — to the European project “Addressing the Demographic Challenge in the Insurance Sector: A Collection and Dissemination of Good Practices”, which was completed in 2012 (realised with the financial support of the European Commission).

‘Today’s population is ageing and declining in numbers. That will mean unprecedented challenges for the European Union’s demographic future’, explained Elke Maes, UNI Europa Finance coordinator for the social dialogue in the insurance sector at the Bucharest conference. ‘With baby boomers starting to retire, we are looking at an increasing number of retired citizens and too few workers to adequately fund welfare state programmes because low birth rates are obviously reducing the number of young workers entering the labour market.’

These demographic changes affect the European insurance sector both in its capacity as product providers (of life, pension, health and long-term care insurance, for example) and as employers.

But the sector also presents lot of innovative measures as the conference publication shows. Similarly to the last edition (from 2012), the three main themes of best practices examples from all over Europe are work-life balance; qualifications and lifelong learning; and health and safety at work. The new collection also covers telework, which has become increasingly important for insurance employees in recent years and working longer (with a focus on developing career models that are fair to all generations of workers).

‘The social partners in the insurance sector hope that this booklet will inspire further initiatives at company or national level to tackle the demographic challenge together,’ Elke Maes concluded.

Read the full publication here