Digitalisation and collective bargaining

Digital binary

(18 December) Earlier this month, EPSU’s two-year project on collective bargaining and digitalisation was concluded with a two-day conference (8-9 December). It brought together over 50 European and national trade unionists and experts from 21 countries.

The various conference sessions provided an opportunity to debate a wide range of themes from artificial intelligence and workers’ data rights to health and safety and restructuring. The specific debates were as follows with presentations available below:

  • Developing a compendium of collective agreement clauses on digitalisation (Danny Bertossa, Assistant General Secretary, PSI)
  • the European cross-sector agreement on digitalisation (Juliane Bir, head of trade union policy, ETUC)
  • negotiating on digitalisation with federal administration (Nils Kammradt, head of federal and regional government section, ver.di (Germany))
  • the framework of actions on digitalisation in the European sector social dialogue for electricity (Guillaume Durivaux, utilities and company policy officer, EPSU)
  • negotiating on artificial intelligence (Aida Ponce, senior researcher – foresight, European Trade Union Institute)
  • Negotiating workers’ data rights – using and improving the General Data Protection Regulations (Dr Christina J Colcough, digital trends expert)
  • Checklist on work-life balance and digitalisation negotiated in the European social dialogue for central government administrations (Nadja Salson, national and European administration officer, EPSU)
  • Digitalisation and equality (Allison Roche, policy officer, UNISON (UK))
  • The technological transition (Håvard Sivertsen, national union secretary, Fagforbundet (Norway))
  • Health and safety (Anna Spånt Enbuske, researcher, Kommunal (Sweden))

The project, funded by the European Commission, was run in collaboration with researchers and trainers from the Ecorys and wmp consultancies – Andrea Broughton, Eckhard Voss and Jeff Bridgford. They prepared and ran the project’s five regional seminars and facilitated the final conference.  They also developed a toolkit on collective bargaining and digitalisation which EPSU will continue to work on in collaboration with PSI to see how it might complement the compendium of collective agreements that is being drafted by researchers for PSI.

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