Today, October 24, the European trade union movement is launching its toolkit on implementing EU legislation on Work Life Balance. The aim is to enable parents and other people with caring responsibilities to better balance their work and family lives, and to encourage a better sharing of caring responsibilities between women and men.
“Trade unions and employers play a key role in empowering workers to have a say in shaping their working life. Collective bargaining is the well-established tool to bring this about“, said UNI Europa’s Regional Secretary, Oliver Roethig. “We call on the member states and the EU institutions to implement the work life balance directive quickly at national level in close cooperation with the social partners and through collective bargaining.”
Amel Djemail, UNI Europa’s Equal Opportunities Director, added: “We now have the Rebalance Toolkit. Let’s us as trade unions now work together with other stakeholders to make a difference. Let’s improve the reconciliation of work, family and private life and ensure a more gender-balanced distribution of family care across Europe.”
The ETUC’s REBALANCE project, whose final conference is taking place today in Rome, was led in close collaboration with the three Italian Trade Union Confederations, CGIL, CISL and UIL and the support of its associated partners and affiliated organisations.
UNI Europa’s strong involvement in the REBALANCE project highlights the need to improve equal opportunities on the labour market and presents concrete good practices in promoting work life balance through our working-life democracy, namely collective bargaining.
The objectives of this Conference are indeed to disseminate and promote the final results of the study on social partners’ practices tackling work-life balance issues in collective bargaining, as well as to launch the transposition guide of the Directive. It will also aim at raising awareness on the better use of collective bargaining on work-life balance.
This Toolkit supports ETUC member organisations to work towards better work-life balance at national levels. In particular, this tool aims to support the work of ETUC member organisations to ensure the proper implementation of the work—life balance directive in their respective countries. It provides information on the process of the transposition of the new directive, possible barriers to the proper transpositions and arguments that support the need for tangible improvements of legislation and practice.
The EU directive on work-life balance for parents and carers. The text was agreed earlier this year. It needs to become law in the EU member states within 3 years.
The toolkit was distributed at the ETUC Executive Committee this week and trade union leaders joined force in a photo action pushing for meaningful and quick transposition.
For further information, please contact Amel Djemail, UNI Europa Equal Opportunities Director: amel.djemail@uniglobalunion.org
