Valletta, Malta - Delegates from 13 European Union accession countries met in Valetta, Malta, in February, to mark the culmination of a decade of adapting labour laws, institutions of social dialogue, and policies, for their successful integration into Europe.
They have already achieved far-reaching economic and institutional reforms. The role of the ILO will be to give continued guidance on the development of credible social dialogue and industrial relations, consistent with practice in the rest of the EU and with ILO values.
Sally Paxton, Executive Director of the ILO Social Dialogue sector, addressed tripartite delegations representing governments, employers and workers from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey. There have been, she said, “far-reaching and unprecedented economic and institutional reforms, particularly in the transition countries, covering in a decade what many other countries required a century to do”.
The ILO and the EU share common objectives. For one thing, the European social model fits well with the ILO Decent Work agenda. Also, the ILO believes that an enlarged EU will mean an enlarged area of social stability, prosperity, rising living standards, and respect for fundamental rights.
The discussions made it clear that social dialogue has been fully accepted as a highly effective tool for managing labour market and workplace changes. New challenges are increasingly being tackled through social dialogue, including enterprise productivity, competitiveness, and improvement in the quality of working life.
Ten of the 13 accession countries were about to enter the EU, so the conference was a timely opportunity to address both the progress which had been made and the challenges posed to the new EU members. Despite economic growth of 4.7 per cent in 1995-2000, the ILO considers the overall economic and social situations in the candidate countries to be far from satisfactory. Unemployment remains high in six of the accession countries - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia have an average rate over 10 per cent - and long-term unemployment in 2000 reached 48 per cent of total unemployment in ten Central and Eastern European countries.
Questions also remain on the representativeness of the social partners, gender equality, and the role of civil society groups in social dialogue. But, Ms. Paxton concluded, the ILO will continue to provide assistance on capacity-building for the social partners, labour law reform, and the promotion of social dialogue at the regional level.
And the work will continue. The ILO has scheduled an informal ministerial meeting on 10 June, in Geneva, to discuss a working paper on “Recent Trends in Pension Reform and Implementation in the EU Accession Countries”. World of Work will report on this in a future issue. The ILO Social Dialogue sector is using the papers prepared for the conference and the conclusions drawn from it as the basis for further meetings in Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kyrgystan. Also, in preparation for the ILO European Regional Meeting, scheduled for early 2005, the ILO is launching a project on “flexicurity” to reconcile labour market flexibility and employment security in Central and Eastern European countries.