Social Agenda Issue 54

Effective equality of opportunities: It's important for society to benefit from all the talents that are available, to have men and women sharing tasks. © Belga Image You don’t see it at the start of a career. When they come out of school or of an education system, women even have better results than men and they are in the majority. Then they start working. They build a family and from the moment they have children, you see their career path becoming more horizontal or going down a little bit. There are interruptions, short leaves, long leaves and then sometimes they leave the labour market altogether. Yet we need all the talents we can and we have shortages of skills! We have so many talented ladies, young and older ones, in whom society has invested and who want to be active on the labour market. But because they are most of the time in charge of care-taking tasks, they can't develop their full potential on the labour market. On the other side, we know that there are more men than before who want to carry out care-taking tasks. The children are also their children. And we see that there is an imbalance. We analysed the problem and we were informed that the cause of the lower participation on the labour market for women is care-taking tasks. Why don't men take them up, even when they have the right to do so (we already have a parental leave directive in Europe)? Because it is often not paid and they usually happen to be the first earners, because of the traditional state of play. This is why they don’t take up their leave. What we want to do is give really equal opportunities to men and women by our proposal both for care and on the labour market. If the opportunities are really equal, then it's up to the households to see how they make these choices. It's important for society to benefit from all the talents that are available, to have men and women sharing tasks. Women want to be more successful with their potential on the labour market or in their career and men want to be more successful in their quest to be more available for care-taking tasks. So it's a win-win situation! You have also been addressing the new forms of employment, through access to social protection for all workers and a new directive on transparent and predictable working conditions… We have a double challenge there. We need more convergence among Member States. So either we agree on downward convergence and let things go automatically or we want upwards convergence, in which case we need to make an effort. That is why we are active on that front too. But we also have to prepare ourselves and people for the new world of work: digitalisation, globalisation, demographic ageing… We have to adapt and we see that, due to digitalisation, already now and certainly in the future, we will have jobs that we cannot even imagine at this stage. There will be a demand for more flexibility. There will be many short-term jobs, for a couple of hours a week, and so on… If people have to do these kind of jobs, even if they wish to, because it also gives them flexibility, then we must make sure that they enjoy good working conditions and that they can work in dignity. This is why we say first and foremost that, for people who work in precarious situations (for instance, on-call contracts), that they should know in which slots they can be requested to work, how long beforehand they must receive notice of this and make themselves available, and also enjoy certain material rights that must be offered to them. We have seen the way the Written Statement Directive was implemented SOC I A L AG E NDA / MA R C H 2 0 1 9 / 1 7