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The Social Partners' Groundwork on Innovation

June 2006

The EQUAL Seminar "Social Partners' Groundwork on Innovation" brought together on 30 May some 220 participants including a majority of sectoral and cross-industry social partners, academic experts in the field of social dialogue and industrial relations, and Commission representatives.

Four topics had been identified which interlace the European partners' social work and the fields where social partners had coordinated EQUAL ground projects: adaptation to change, equal opportunities between women and men, active ageing and employability of vulnerable groups.

Regarding restructuring, it emerged from the debates on the projects that were presented that the setting up of adaptation structures, whether they are established to allow training in the wire of developments in a particular sector, to perform the employees' trainings, including older ones, or to build sustainable development in a region, was without doubt a suitable reply to the question on the necessary adaptation to change. It was also said that innovation is all the clearer as it makes it possible to set up tools or adaptation structures on a territory and/or in a sector, which is not just limited to a period of crisis or to a restructuring operation of a company.

New! The publication on the event's outcomes

For equal opportunities between women and men, innovation within the projects resided either in the very concrete and systematic method that was chosen which approached all the aspects of a problem or in the tools set up, or in the originality of the initial question. It was also stressed that "multi-actors" synergy culture does not go without saying.

Regarding active ageing, it was declared that the submitted projects were stimulants and fell under optics of promotion of age diversity in enterprises. One of the keys of innovative projects lay in the nature of the selected measures which sought to solve the difficulties related to employment of senior citizens instead of simply seeking to protect their status. The importance was to manage overall the challenges related to active ageing instead of seeking to attribute the difficulties of employment to older workers themselves, which is one of the reasons for their current "stigmatisation".

Lastly, debates on the employability of vulnerable groups showed the need for the involvement of social partners in flexisecurity and in employability. It was also declared that partnership is not enough, a very good idea is not enough either, it must above all be able to ensure its transfer, which is not always an easy thing insofar as projects were generally of local or regional nature.

In all these cases, the partnership was declared vital even though creating reliable relationships can take time. For each topic, the European social partners took the opportunity which was given to them to confront EQUAL practices with their own work, which was a novelty.