On Wednesday 8 March, European social partners endorsed a framework agreement providing tools and measures to enable more elderly workers remain on the labour market until the legal age of retirement, whilst facilitating inter-generational transition in a context of high youth unemployment.
This framework agreement is the result of nine months of negotiations and responds to demographic challenges. It was initialled by the employers (BusinessEurope, UEAPME, CEEP) and trade unions (European Trade Union Confederation) on Wednesday and sent to the European leaders during the tripartite social summit that usually takes place ahead of the European Spring Council. It will involve an autonomous framework agreement based on article 155 of the TFEU, which will be implemented by the social partners over a three-year period, as part of existing European and national legislation.
Social partners have set themselves five objectives: 1) Increasing awareness and understanding of demographic change; 2) Promoting and managing active ageing; 3) Ensuring and maintaining a healthy, safe and productive working environment; 4) Fostering innovative “life-cycle” approaches with productive and quality jobs to enable people to remain in work until legal retirement age; 5) Facilitating exchanges, mutual cooperation and fostering concrete actions to transfer knowledge and experience between generations in the workplace.
This framework agreement is available at: https://goo.gl/DyUCTW. (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)