Introduction

The Final Conference was delayed for more than eight months (it was originally scheduled on 15-17 June 2020). Nonetheless, we sticked to the basic objectives we had indicated in April 2018, when we presented the Project to the DG Employment.

The agenda included the same kinds of participants (union representatives from the multinationals and the trade unions participating in the Project + employers’ representatives + Member of the European Parliament) we had listed at the time. And we also maintained the same structure, with joint sessions, sessions for union representatives only, and the final round table.

During our Final Conference it was not possible to have a representative of the DG Employment. We promptly sent an invitation, but our contact person was not able to attend. Unfortunately, we could not change the February dates because of a number of organizational and contractual constraints. The Grant Agreement which funded the Project activities was set to expire on 31 March 2021 – after a 5-month extension that was agreed upon with a specific amendment to the original Agreement.

We neither discussed nor drew up any final documents. However, we agreed with the social partners of the finance industry and with the Member of the European Parliament to keep on working together to reach an agreement on some joint proposals to update and amend EU Directives on employee involvement.

We laid the foundations for this common path during the meeting of the steering committee which took place last October. Back then, we met Jens Thau, President of the Banking Committee for European Social Affairs of the European Banking Federation, Giancarlo Ferrara, Head of Social Affairs for the Italian Banking Association, and Angelo Di Cristo, Head of UNI Global Finance. The latter is the European and international federation with which FISAC-CGIL is affiliated. One of the institutional tasks of UNI Finance is to engage in European Social Dialogue of the banking and insurance sectors in the name and on behalf of the national trade unions which represent the workers of these sectors.

The Final Conference marked the beginning of this work, with the goal of organizing a joint event by the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022.

I will get back to this later on, when I summarize the topics and discussion of the round table and of the joint session held in preparation of it.

FIRST SESSION

24.02.2021

The attachments to this Report include the full speeches by Mario Ongaro, Project Director, and Agostino Megale, formerly President of ISRF LAB and Secretary-General of FISAC-CGIL, with whom I collaborated on the political and research elements of the Project. 

Very briefly, here are the titles of the two speeches and of their chapters:

UPDATE ON THE EUROPEAN PROJECT AND FUTURE PROSPECTS (Mario Ongaro)

• Constraints, limits, potential and opportunities of an online conference: between pandemic and digitalization
• A different use of time in a different logistical organization of the collective events in a European Project
• Our agenda for the Final Plenary of 24-25-26 February: three questions to EWC representatives
• When there is no alternative to the renegotiation of the constituent agreement
• The ability of EWCs and trade unions to represent new workers
• The 4.0 workers involved in this European Project, the EU Directives and the need to reform collective bargaining
• From Sofia to Rome through Belgrade
• Our fitness check of the EU Directives on employee involvement, our dialogue with employers’ representatives, the collaboration with UNI Finance, the relationship with the European Parliament
• The final round table and the follow-up to the European Project

AGOSTINO MEGALE

Introduction (Rome, 24 February 2021)

• The role of trade unions and EWCs in the era of digitalization, of changes in human work (which does not disappear) and of the acceleration caused by the pandemic
• EWCs  and the anticipation of change in the framework of Next Generation EU 
• Our 4 key points (combined with the 13 proposals by professor Dorssemont) to anticipate change in relation to business plans and transnational groups
• The need to govern change in the financial sector in the framework of Next Generation EU and of an effective employee involvement
• Strong trade unions with new skills to take up and meet the challenge of change
• Using the productivity increases generated by digitalization to protect and retrain employees

On 24 February we listened to the point of view of those who experience changes in work organization in their daily lives, i.e. employees and their representatives at the company level.

Their experiences were analyzed in three surveys carried out by sociologist Piero Valentini in collaboration with ISRF LAB, the research institute of FISAC-CGIL. 

The first survey involved 50 respondents, including employees and their direct union representatives, from various service departments. Its results can be summarized as follows:

• Restructuring is no longer achieved through a sequence of different processes occurring one after the other. Restructuring is now a continuous and uninterrupted process. Keeping up with it confuses not only employees and their representatives, but also the managers who organize work. The shared feeling of confusion is a factor that can potentially stimulate a dynamic and innovative social dialogue
• Respondents are fully aware of the situation and they ask social dialogue and collective bargaining to move from the traditional defensive approach to a proactive approach that can anticipate change
• The main demands highlighted by the survey are the following: reinforcing the coordination of trade unions at the transnational level; support of national trade unions to EWCs, also through appropriate training; making transnational information effective by advancing it, thus making consultation possible
• Reconsidering the work-life balance in the light of the widespread diffusion of remote work following COVID-19.

A summary of the results of the second survey was already attached to the report on the meeting of last October.

The experiences of EWCs and transnational groups

through the three questions which I asked them:

1) Do you think that information practices and, most of all, CONSULTATION practices are adequate in your EWC?

2) Do you think that the current Agreement regulating your EWC activity can be renegotiated and that such renegotiation can improve the quality of information and, most of all, the quality of consultation?

3) Do you think that 4.0 employees (i.e. the kind of employees who are at the core of this European Project of ours) are adequately represented in your EWC? 

Are, or have you been, adequately informed and consulted as EWC about the issues concerning them directly, such as digital innovation and the flexible organization of work and working hours? 

Of the eight transnational groups which formally joined the project three years ago through their EWCs and company-level unions, two did not take part in the last two events. This may not be accidental, considering that we were forced to delay the two events for many months because of the pandemic. We were not able to keep Groupama and Société Générale involved, while KBC and Unicredit respectively did not take part in the meeting of the steering group of last October and in this Final Conference.

We were clearly very sorry for these “defections”. However, we are not particularly concerned, because, to a certain extent, they can be considered as normal and linked to turnover in union representative bodies. It is reasonable to believe that some of the individuals who undertook to actively participate in the Project for its entire duration in 2018 (and 2019) reached the end of their terms of office and were not able to delegate their successors. Furthermore, the change might have occurred during the course of the Project because of its unusual extension due to the pandemic.

With respect to the geographical and transnational representativeness and to the relevance of the six groups which continued to take part in the Project, there was no decline. Indeed, the six groups are present across the entire European Union, including candidate countries, and they have a global footprint. Furthermore, their employees are traditionally represented by well-rooted trade unions and the quality of industrial relations is very high.

After this methodological explanation, I would like to summarize the answers to the three questions above, together with important parallel information that we collected on the priorities existing in these groups. In all groups, the priority was the impact of the pandemic on work organization through the massive diffusion of remote work, which was made possible by the acceleration of digitalization.

The answers to the three questions basically confirmed what we have been saying for years on the functioning of EWCs: 

• The existing constituent agreements should be renegotiated for two basic reasons:
  • they are not in line with Directive 2009/38. Some of these agreements are really distant from the principles established by Directive 2009/38, while others only require some adjustments.
  • Digitalization and the resulting considerable changes in work organization are posing problems to the full implementation of the rights to information and consultation laid down in constituent agreements. Despite being in line with Directive 2009/38, these agreements were written with a much more traditional work organization in mind than the current one.
• For this reason, the representation of 4.0 employees has become a challenge. EWCs are facing this challenge, but they have to deal with the lack of training of trade unionists – an issue which we had already identified when we elaborated this Project three years ago.

During the discussion, we also went back to the issue of the constituent agreement of the EWC of BNP-Paribas. The management does not want to renegotiate it arguing that the agreement was concluded pursuant to art. 13 of Directive 94/45. We believe that this argument is unfounded. The company for which that agreement was signed no longer exists, because BNP-Paribas is the result of a merger which radically changed the structure of the group.

However, this is not just a legal matter. Our argument cannot be disputed. Proof of this is the renegotiation which I led in 2019 in my capacity as expert from UNI Europa, which led to the renegotiation of the EWC agreement of Crédit Suisse, which had also been concluded pursuant to art. 13. The real issue is political: it concerns the relationships of power existing in the EWC between trade unions from different countries, between UNI affiliates and non-affiliates, and the will/advantage of opening a discussion/dispute with the group’s management. 

Our only possibility is the manifest inadequacy of information and consultation, whose limits are clearly due to the inadequacy of the agreement. This is the only possibility we have of convincing even the most reluctant ones of the absolute need to renegotiate the agreement in order to avoid the poor functioning of the EWC.

However, in the long term the only possible solution is the legislative one, i.e. an amendment to the survival clause for agreements concluded pursuant to art. 13 of Directive 94/45. The survival clause is included under art. 14a of Directive 2009/38.

Another issue was the one raised by Elena Cherubini, member of the Secretariat of the Central Coordination Unit for FISAC-CGIL at Intesa Sanpaolo. Unfortunately, the largest Italian group – one of the largest in Europe – stands out for not having created any EWC yet.

Elena’s full speech is attached to this Report for reference.

SECOND SESSION

25.02.2021

This session was opened by the presentation of the results of the third survey by sociologist Piero Valentini. This survey focused on 4.0 employees of the banking industry through a series of wide-ranging and in-depth interviews.

The full speech and the PowerPoint presentation by Piero Valentini are attached to this Report for reference.

The presentation outlines a very complex and dynamic situation, with both positive and critical aspects. It is a rapidly changing situation, which requires trade unions to be able to represent this new kind of employees, even if for the moment they remain a minority.

Why do we pay so much attention to them? 

Because these employees represent the future. Because we know that, in the coming years, the generation of employees and union officers who organize traditional work in banks – who are still a majority – will respectively leave the production cycle and trade unions simply for age-related reasons. This turnover started more than 10 years ago, but in recent years there has been an acceleration, which has been driven in particular by early retirement schemes funded by the finance industry.

Therefore, trade unions must be up to the challenge of engaging and organizing these employees and of identifying among them potential union representatives.

There is no realistic alternative to this. 

But the presentation also focuses on entrepreneurs, companies and employers’ representatives.

If, as is predictable and fair, companies invest in young employees who represent the future and expect high productivity and profitability from them, they must be aware that they also have to meet the expectations of these employees and reward them with appropriate professional opportunities and salaries. Companies must overcome organizational uncertainties and bottlenecks, invest increasing resources in training, and provide guarantees in relation to the responsibilities which 4.0 employees are often forced to take upon themselves. Companies must implement measures to prevent demotivation in this kind of employees. If they really plan to invest in these workers, companies must seriously take this problem into consideration. This topic certainly deserves being investigated further, but it fully pertains to social dialogue and collective bargaining.

The presentation by Piero Valentini was integrated by Mariarosaria Mazzotta from the Coordination Unit for FISAC-CGIL at Intesa Sanpaolo. She made a detailed overview of the working conditions and contractual arrangements introduced by the company with the so-called Mixed Contract. Under this agreement, young workers work for Intesa Sanpaolo for two days in five in a branch as employees, and for the remaining three days as freelance financial promoters.

Mariarosaria highlighted how the two working conditions are balanced and she described the guarantees provided to these young workers in terms of salaries and legal provisions. She also underscored the need for trade unions to make a targeted and specific effort to engage and represent this kind of 4.0 employees. 

A colleague from Intesa Sanpaolo representative of this category highlighted the potential of this peculiar working condition. In particular, these workers have considerable opportunities to freely organize their working hours, they have interesting prospects in terms of salary growth, and they feel more motivated to work and achieve results. The main problem is inadequate training, which is excessively delegated to the colleagues working in branches, who are not motivated to train these young workers. Another problem consists in the “unproductive” workload due to merely administrative and bureaucratic tasks. Furthermore, these workers have to deal with the tax-related obligations typical of self-employment. However, since they work exclusively for Intesa Sanpaolo, the company should take care of these tasks.

The session continued with the speeches of the national trade unions from France, Italy, Malta, Serbia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary (see attachments).

On 25 February, the afternoon session focused on the preparation of the round table of the following day. There was a very open and informal discussion which involved Giancarlo Ferrara (ABI, Italian Banking Association), Jens Thau (European Banking Federation) and Claudio Cornelli (Head of International Affairs at FISAC-CGIL).