This EU Project in its route and goals

by Mario Ongaro• Project Manager

The Project, with its inevitably long and complex title, was elaborated and presented last May by Mario Ongaro, Director of the European Section of ISRF LAB, the Research and Training Institute of Fisac-Cgil, and former Coordinator of the International Department. Our proposal was accepted by the DG Employment of the European Commission, which awarded us the funds necessary for its implementation.

This Project will take place over 2 years – until the end of 2020 – and it will require a lot of work and human resources on the part of Fisac-Cgil and ISRF LAB. Therefore, it has been necessary to integrate the Steering Committee (existing in every European Project) with a working group formed by Agostino Megale, President of ISRF LAB, Giuliano Calcagni, Secretary-General of Fisac-Cgil, and Mario Ongaro, Project Director. The basic political objective of the Project is to start a process aimed at introducing new procedures for the involvement and participation of employees in the changes brought about by industry 4.0. This will be done through a fitness check, requested by the European Commission, of the actual implementation of the Directives adopted in the last 4 decades to promote employee involvement. 

The long title perfectly summarizes the topics covered by the Project. It also implicitly states its goals, as is required by the calls for proposals in which national trade unions, European federations of trade unions, as well as national and European employers’ associations take part. These Projects must be aimed at analyzing issues and at indicating goals. In our case, we intend to work for 2 years with the trade union representatives of 7 large banking groups and 1 insurance group, all of which have a transnational, global dimension, with offices in all of the European Union and branches scattered in all continents.

For trade unions, a clearly fundamental element is the overall number of employees: considering all the workers of the 8 groups around the world, the total amounts to almost 1 million (despite the reduction due to restructuring processes and to the transfers of undertakings which have taken place in the last 10 years).

The groups involved in the Project are: Intesa SanPaolo and Unicredit group for Italy, Crédit Agricole, Bnp Paribas, Société Générale and Groupama for France, Santander for Spain, and K.B.C. for Belgium.

All of these groups have had a European Works Council (EWC) for years, except for Intesa SanPaolo, where procedures for the setting up of a EWC have already been launched. The EWC is the body established under EU Directive 2009/38 in which workers’ representatives from all over Europe (including the 28 current EU Member States and Candidate Countries) meet top management representatives from the group’s parent company to be informed and consulted on all the topics which have a significant impact on employees and which play a significant role for their working conditions and future prospects.

The EWC does not engage in collective bargaining, which remains the exclusive prerogative of union representatives who have industrial relations with local management and/or national employers’ associations in the various countries. However, if all of their rights are fully implemented, EWCs can provide important social dialogue tools that can have an impact on the strategic transnational decisions of parent companies.

As pointed out by Agostino Megale (now President of ISRF LAB and former Secretary-General of Fisac from 2010 to 2018) in his introductory remarks at the Sofia meeting, EWCs should not radically change their role as information and consultation bodies, but rather strengthen, update and fully implement it. In our opinion, in order to do so they must experiment innovative practices, capable of keeping up with the speed of change and to integrate the traditional information and consultation procedure with the anticipation of change. The latter can be achieved by building together with transnational groups what we may call a social plan on digitized work. Its elaboration should entail the involvement of workers and their representatives to discuss redeployment, retraining and training opportunities. In short, it should give a concrete application of the principle of employee involvement established by the Directives, whose fitness check was required by the European Commission and to which we want to contribute.

Agostino underlined that EWCs are the only example in the world of a workers’ representation body in transnational groups. In our sector, we know that we have to deal with American banking giants which, after the crisis, are now back to double-digit profits, and with Chinese State giants which operate all over the world for the construction of new infrastructures.

In this competitive framework, the European banking system will be forced to proceed to further business combinations and mergers. However, this process must be guided and supported by public authorities, in order to protect workers, clients and the European economy as a whole.

A stronger social dialogue, which can keep up with the times and anticipate change, thus becomes an indispensable tool.

It is with social dialogue in mind that I considered the participation of the European Banking Federation as essential. The Federation represents private and commercial banks (i.e. the vast majority of credit institutions) in the EU and, together with its President, we will discuss possible proposals on joint objectives.

First, as trade union representatives, we will discuss between ourselves on which topics and goals we can work with the European Banking Federation. Then, we will involve not only the Federation, but also some representatives of the top management of these large groups. In an unprecedented approach for this kind of European Projects, we will exchange views, ideas and possible joint proposals with employers’ representatives and we are determined to make the most of the opportunity.

Changes in work organization in the 4.0 finance industry clearly have a direct impact on workers and it is up to union officers to speak on their behalf.

This is the essential reason why we decided to involve in all Project stages the union representatives in transnational groups and in their EWCs. We certainly did not exclude national trade unions (we will have 14 of them from 13 different countries), but we are aware that company-level union representatives are in the front line in addressing change. Those of them who also chair EWCs (or are involved in industrial relations with the parent company) can get first-hand access to information on change and future prospects in good time, so they can help trade unions to react quickly and appropriately. The response will certainly also involve national unions, but it should always start from the input of company-level union representations and EWCs.

The speed of change is the challenge we have to tackle

and it is what strongly characterizes the 4.0 era in our sector:

• speed of change in work organization, 
• and in the workplace(s) which companies create for their employees;
• speed of change in the nature of the employment relationship: from typical employees to parasubordinate workers (i.e. formally self-employed but dependent on a single employer for their income);  
• speed of change in working hours, in two directions. On the one hand, working hours are more flexibly distributed across the day, the week, or the year. This has led to an extension in the time period between the beginning and the end of work, so much so that Italian trade unions have claimed the workers’ right to disconnect from the tools (phone, email, etc.) which employers can use to contact them;
• on the other hand, flexibility is combined with a sort of self-management of working hours which is functional to the achievement of production and sales targets.

These are challenges that we must necessarily address. Otherwise – as pointed out by Agostino – we will lose our representativeness and ability to negotiate change. Furthermore, we need to promote a productive and professional synergy in banks between older generations and digital natives.

This is a challenge emerging from the new composition of bank workforce following the changes of the 4.0 era.

On the one hand, industry 4.0 change in banks 

is causing major employment issues in the entire traditional segment of the production cycle. Most standard jobs with none to little added value have been outsourced or completely automated. However, some still exist, as is the case in traditional branches and in the back office of Central Departments. These segments of the production cycle employ relatively old workers, who can hardly be redeployed to tasks with a higher added value. As trade unions, I think we can only negotiate a number of guarantees that can protect the income and the pensions of these older workers. This has been the case, for instance, in Italy in recent decades.

On the other hand, industry 4.0 change in banks

leads to the emergence of a new workforce, or to the renewal of part of the existing workforce. Through smart working, digitization, teleworking, new jobs which combine the characteristics of employees with time management schemes and tasks more typical of self-employment, this new workforce is necessarily more flexible when it comes to working hours and place of work. However, the added value of this new workforce is based on specialist professional skills, which can open up important opportunities of career advancement and pay rise.

The role of trade unions at a national level and, even more so, at a company level is to represent both types of workers: the traditional workforce and the “smart” one of industry 4.0. In other words, trade unions must protect the former from the repercussions of marginalization and expulsion from the production cycle. At the same time, they must meet the needs and expectations of the new workforce. If trade unions fail to do so, this new workforce would only have management (up to the top levels) as its only interlocutor.

This brings us back to the involvement of the European Banking Federation (EBF), represented by Jens Thau, President of the Banking Committee for European Social Affairs of the EBF. We need to involve the EBF if we want trade unions to be able to talk to the new workforce segment in banks. Not only it is our duty to represent these new workers, but we also have to learn how to represent them, as some EWC Presidents told us in Sofia. Part of the problem is indeed the training of trade unionists, who must acquire new skills and tools in order to be on the same wavelength as younger workers. The horizons of the latter are no longer (or no longer exclusively) made of a monthly fixed salary for fixed working hours and standardized, predictable work. The new generation of workers now has variable goals, variable working hours, relative autonomy and self-management opportunities, very good relational skills and the willingness to address complex and ambitious tasks.

First, we must complete our analysis of change processes, in such a way to be well-prepared for an open, in-depth discussion with the European Banking Federation, but also with some representatives of top management of the groups represented in the Project (i.e. with those who represent central management for the EWCs involved in our Project).

In this key stage of the Project, we will ask UNI Finance to collaborate with our Steering Committee. In particular, UNI Finance will be asked to play its typical political role in our dialogue with the social partners of the finance industry, similarly to what it does in Banking Social Dialogue. To this purpose, we will work together with Angelo Di Cristo to be adequately prepared and to agree on the approach which UNI Finance should adopt. In doing so, we will take into account that – as suggested by Agostino – one of the goals of our interaction with the social partners is the elaboration of a Social Plan on employee involvement.

In my capacity as the Project Director, I would now like to underline one last aspect. The legal pillar of our Project is the analysis of the existing connections between changes in work organization in the 4.0 finance industry and the European Directives on employee involvement.

Our argument is that the full implementation of workers’ rights under these Directives – in EWC Agreements, in company-level and in national collective bargaining – is a powerful and essential tool to allow us to tackle the challenge of change and to address it jointly with management. It is certainly not the only tool, but a powerful and mandatory one.

This topic was addressed in the lecture by Professor Filip Dorssemont, with whom we are going to closely collaborate until the Belgrade Plenary and afterwards.

We already had a very fruitful collaboration with Filip Dorssemont (Professor of European Labour Law at the Catholic University of Louvain) in our latest Project. During this Project, his documentation will be promptly published on the website of Fisac.

In Sofia, Nicola Cicala, Director of ISRF LAB, presented the results of the survey carried out among all the union representatives taking part in the Project. The objective of the survey was to give a preliminary overview of the current situation, prospects and union stances in EWCs on industry 4.0 change. The survey results basically confirmed our initial perceptions and analysis. Together with Nicola’s report, they will soon be published on our website.

The following speakers, representing their respective EWCs and transnational groups, were: 

• Bnp-Paribas – Silvia Romano (EWC Deputy Secretary)
• Société Générale – Cristian Mocanu (EWC Secretary)
• Crédit Agricole – Dominique Mendes (member of the EWC Select Committee)
• K.B.C. – Guido Van Den Eeckhoudt (EWC President)
• Unicredit group – Francesco Colasuonno (EWC President)
• Santander – Noemi Trabado Gago (EWC member)
• Intesa SanPaolo – Elena Cherubini (member of the Secretariat of the Central Coordination Unit) 

In their speeches, they explained the peculiarities and common aspects of change and of the policies they adopted to handle it. The following exchange with us (the Project coordinators) and with Professor Dorssemont ranged from the involvement of young workers to the related renewal of union officers, from the adequacy/inadequacy of existing EWC Agreements to the illustration of company-level agreements, like the one of Intesa SanPaolo about the so-called “hybrid” forms of employment (which combine the characteristics of employees with others more typical of self-employment).

The contents of these speeches will also be made available on the website of Fisac-Cgil. The same will be done for the conclusions by Claudio Cornelli, National Secretary of Fisac-Cgil (also in charge of International Affairs), who spoke on behalf of the Secretary-General Giuliano Calcagni (legal representative of the Project), and for the speech by Angelo Di Cristo, Head of UNI Global Finance. The latter has been collaborating extensively with the Steering Committee of our European Project since the first meeting in Sofia. In addition to the trade union representatives of the 8 transnational groups mentioned above, the Project involves the staff of Fisac-Cgil and of ISRF LAB, namely Agostino Megale, Mario Ongaro, Nicola Cicala, as well as Francesca Carnoso, Legal Expert of Fisac-Cgil, Cristiano Hoffmann, Organizational Director of Fisac-Cgil, and Rita Diotallevi, Head of Administration at Fisac-Cgil. This staff is well-prepared to perform all the obligations under the contract signed with the European Commission.