While the ten new EU Member States (Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia), which joined the EU on 1 May 2004, have committed themselves to reach EU labour standards, significant gaps or decent work deficits still exist between former and new EU Members, notably in terms of wages, working time and other working conditions.
This is the reason why the ILO, in cooperation with the European Commission, has launched a series of comparative research projects to better identify the trends in working and employment conditions in the enlarged EU.
A first project was carried out in 2004-05 that succeeded in providing two main original contributions:
- for the first time, it provided information on practices at enterprise level through a series of more than 20 case studies in several new Member States;
- it identified how the different elements of the World of Work – employment contracts, working time, wages, social dialogue and workers’ participation, reconciliation of work and family – are combined, interact and are negotiated at local level.
A final tripartite conference was organized in Brussels in April 2005 with major government, trade union and employer representatives from all EU countries, which led to interesting policy debates.
The experts’ comprehensive study – that led to a major publication in this area – not only presents timely information on trends in working and employment conditions in the ten new EU Member States within a year of their accession, but also provides new insight into general trends that we may expect between convergence and diversity in an enlarged EU. (See press articles.)
Since then, a second project – still in close cooperation with the European Commission – is being carried out, in order to complete the initial picture:
- first, to extend the analysis of trends in the World of Work to all 25 EU Members as well as to the three future Members: Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania.
- second, to try focusing on the most vulnerable segments of the labour market: the workers or groups of workers who are found to be most at risk along the identified trends in the world of work.
In order to complete such comprehensive and comparative research, a group of high-level experts has been put in place with the aim to present first findings – notably from fresh case studies – before the summer of 2006.
More findings will also be presented in the next EC report on industrial relations that the European Commission will publish during 2006. A final tripartite conference will be organized in Brussels in the autumn of 2006 to debate the comparative results and policy implications.
