The project addresses the growing issue of precarious work across Europe, examining it from different perspectives policies, politics, research, and, most importantly, social actors representing workers and structuring it along 4 types of actions :
The project
What is the
project about ?
Awareness raising
Expertise & capacity building
Representation of workers before national and European instances
Advocacy at the EU & national levels
The project consists of a series of opening/ closing events and an online platform for communication and training for CESI trade union members and EU workers in general to gain knowledge, express concerns, raise issues, and reflect on possible synergies to address together challenges related to precarious forms of work contracts in the EU. Precarious work takes different forms across Europe; the main problems reported to date by CESI’s member organisations include the following: frequent uses of zero hour work contracts, an insufficient recognition of ‘on-call time’ as paid working time, and a lack of sufficient and meaningful collective bargaining agreements. One of the major challenges is related to abusive uses of fixed-term contracts.
The project aims to fulfil a three-fold objective; i.e. (1) inform the European level and to sensitise European actors of the growing issue of precarious work and its different forms that trade unions are confronted with, (2) strengthen the voice of trade unions on the ground by equipping them with (legal) information and tools on how to fight against precarious work, (3) develop the knowledge of trade unions and raise awareness on how the EU level -including both EU policies and the legal framework as well as a stronger connection of national trade unions at the European level – can contribute to their mission.
To do so and, as mentioned above, the project will be structured around 4 types of actions:
Awareness
raising
The project will kick-off with a research and consultation phase which aims to collect evidence about the most pressing issues around labour law to identify which are the priorities and knowledge needs of the CESI member organisations affected by precarious work conditions.
An online platform (see below) would be the best tool to engage the members in a cost-effective and consistent manner (also later throughout the life-spam of the project and beyond). The scope of the consultation should be to identify what the issues at stake are but it should not be turned into a complaint mechanism. After prior online consultation of all partners, the project aims to set the baseline of information, knowledge and resources (legal resources) available for the implementation.
Action and commitment for actions to be taken at national level will however be encouraged and managed throughout the project. The way to express commitments to the causes selected will be done using a targeted section on the online platform and members will be engaged to submit forms of commitments they are able to deliver.
Expertise and
capacity building
The project will engage the members and the legal experts through an online platform where news, pieces of information and actual cases/ court decisions will be shared in real time in English language.
Moreover, the online platform can act as a monitoring tool for legal experts to see the latest developments in the field and to help facilitate exchange of good practices between themselves. In terms of returns on investment, this could be measured in the number of inputs received from participating organisations in the platform or the number of cases solved or addressed.
Representation
of workers
The project aims to emphasize and to tap into the latent power and potential of trade unions as voices of the workers and social partners in dialogues at the national and European levels, especially in the countries foreseen (see below) but also beyond them due to spill-over and multiplier effects more and more CESI affiliates take part.;
Advocacy at EU
and national level
Certain actions such as the dissemination of applications of court judgments, joint declarations, insertion of issues into the European Semester/country reports, etc. could be envisaged in order to develop advocacy.
Meetings between policy makers and trade union representatives could be set up in order to raise the impact of the results of the project. CESI is a firm believer that the Social Pillar should be seized at
administrative, political and legislative levels and one of the goals of the project is to empower trade unions to do so at national and European level through different types of activities and joint actions.
