Belgrade - Report 3: goal VI of this project

Find out the common denominator among the TCAs made (or under way) by the participating EWCs in order to build up possible draft TCAs concerning the main issues of the Project through the contribution both of the participating EWCs and of the national/company unions involved;

TCA (Transnational Company Agreement) & Joint Declarations

we had planned to write a sort of Model TCA on the basis of the guidelines that Uni Europa approved in its 2016 Congress. However we were then able to discover that the various TCAs (or more precisely Joint Declarations) that the EWCs participating in the Project had delivered to us, Project staff, were very much tailored on their own specific context as transnational group. The Uni Europa guidelines actually were motivated by two main concerns:

1) No EU Directive actually rules TCAs so that (and this is the

2nd concern) 

a number of EWCs have made a kind of negotiation activity off their own institutional mission (information/consultation) and off any trade-union control and role. As a matter of fact however all Joint Declarations in all the seven EWCs participating in the Project were made and led by genuine trade-unions reps, therefore actually meeting the Uni Europa demand.

Triad: TCAs, EWCs, TUAs (Trade-Union Alliances): On the basis of the concern here above mentioned about an improper negotiating role of EWCs vs. a marginalization of EU trade-union federations in TCAs, this triad may well work as an effective practice to go forward with transnational company agreements by meeting the European trade-unions’ concerns about an activity that EWCs are not entitled to, but at the same time by enabling the national unions allied “around” a specific EWC to join the unionised members of that EWC in a kind of negotiating activity.

We here have to explain that the T.U.A. is a network either cooperating with a EWC or fostering the setting up of a new EWC.

The T.U.A. is made of trade-union officers from the national unions that are indirectly represented in a EWC through its unionised members.

In this respect therefore UNI EUROPA gets a relevant result: it implements a practice to meet the 2009/38 article 12 LINK between transnational level and national levels of information and consultation.

On top of that it provides a concrete political coverage to the unionised members of the concerned EWC whenever an opportunity to negotiate a

T.C.A. is envisaged.

Such negotiation would not be made by the EWC but by a recognised trade- unions’ negotiating body, the T.U.A., which gets EWC members and their respective national unions reps together. We got this innovative procedure through an in-depth exchange of views with Angelo Di Cristo, Head of Uni Finance, therefore one qualified representative of the UNI guidelines mentioned above.

JOINT DECLARATIONS:

they are at a bit lower level than the agreements (TCAs), but they can be effective when the social partners at national level introduce the content of such Joint Declariations into their concerned National Sectoral Collective Agreement, or when the same work is done in the framework of Group Collective Agreement. Joint Declarations are a stepping stone, their form is not juridical but their content is, as long as it provides for rights and obligations This should be the case of the Joint Declaration on Telework and the right to disconnect which has been introduced in the National Collective Agreement for baank workers in Italy. This can be the case of the one on Digitalization in banking and insurance industries (two different EU Sectoral S.D.tables).