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| Contribution
Of The Information Society Forum To The European Summit In Cardiff |
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Newark Declaration The Convergence of Lifelong Learning and Work Reorganisation as a Key Element for Job Creation in the Information Society The advent of the Information Society will shape our future. The Barcelona Declaration formally expressed the deep conviction of the Information Society Forum that the pervasive usage of information technologies will significantly contribute to preparing for employment and to job creation. It argued that the modalities of growth in coming years would be different from the ones in the past as different economic conditions are present; market forces alone would not solve Europe’s delay in entering the Information Society, nor solve the European unemployment problem. It was not calling for additional budgetary expenditure for employment policies, but for making a better use of budgets by focusing on investments in the future (equipment, human capital, RTD, work opportunities). It recommended that the promotion of the Information Society be part of the co-ordinated employment policies launched in November 1997 at the European Summit on Employment in Luxembourg. This message has been acknowledged. The Information Society has a transversal dimension in the "National Action Plans for employment", which the Member-States are currently implementing in respect to the four priority pillars of the Guidelines: entrepreneurship, adaptability, employability and equal opportunities. The President of the European Commission welcomed the Barcelona Declaration and proposed further consultation. The emergence of the Information Society is currently accelerating in Europe; the economic and social context in which the employment policies take place is consequently changing rapidly. From a simple contributor to job creation, the Information Society policy has to become a genuine driver and should shape employment and learning policies to the new realities. Change is so deep for the very organisation of our European societies that the design and the means of the employment and learning policies has to be thought about in an economy where productive organisation is based on flexibility, making best use of human resources and on effective use of plentiful information, where multi-skilling of employees will become usual and life-long job exceptional, and where the boundaries between labour, training and leisure will fade away. Industrial change triggered by globalisation and technological progress will force companies to adapt their productive organisation more rapidly and constantly. It notably requires a continuous upgrading and even a shift in the skills of their employees, in particular towards information and communication technology skills. Up-to-now inflows and outflows of employees, which respectively stemmed from the entry of new worker generations into the employment market and from the retirement of old generations, were sufficient enough to accommodate the general renewal of required skills by the European economies, about between 2 and 3% every year. This demographic process is nowadays too slow to meet the companies’ requirement, which has escalated up to nearly 10% renewal of skills every year, with ever greater demand in the area of ICT skills. Experts consider that the majority of jobs, which will exist by 10 years, are not known today. The knowledge cycle is now shorter than human professional life. The groups recommend that employment policies further evolve increasingly hand-in-hand with the recognition that learning and training throughout one’s life is a pre-requisite to maintaining employment and employability There is no other alternative for the societies at large to implement systems of life-long learning. This, of course, affects training systems of employees, but also education systems. It will be the responsibility of education systems to provide the students with basic and generic knowledge, which will allow them to renew their skills all along their professional life, as well as to prepare them culturally and mentally. Students should be able to leave schools and universities self-confident in their capability to adapt according to their professional life requirements. The role of learning institutions, including schools and universities, is essential to face this challenge. A fundamental requirement for education and training systems to face the new challenges is affordable access to information and communication technologies and provision of appropriate content. The groups recommend that the national education and training systems be assessed and profoundly restructured with the aim to prepare people to learn throughout their lives and to provide citizens with the basic knowledge to use information technologies as a necessary tool to this learning. Industrial change is foreseeable in terms of general trends and broad orientations, but the details, which would enable companies to make operational decisions in good time are impossible to anticipate. In this context of uncertainty, companies have to adopt flexible organisation that is rapidly adaptable to the changes in their environment when they occur. Such adaptive reactions are a prerequisite for their competitiveness. Adaptation generally entails extra-costs to the companies because of their administrative and regulatory business environment: labour market regulations (part-time workers, teleworkers, constraints on working time), fiscal rules (lack of fiscal incentives to human capital investment), social security protection rules (constraints to mobility) and administrative burdens. All these barriers are to be revisited with the aim to alleviate undue costs and facilitate companies’ adaptation to industrial change. The groups recommend that the public authorities regard the adaptation of the business environment as a priority in order to make it more conducive to adaptive organisations of companies. Constraints and undue costs to continuous adaptation should be systematically identified in the Members-States and measures to remove them should be undertaken. The same issues arise for the overall industrial fabric, which has to become more flexible and evolve continuously to grasp the market opportunities. Start-ups and entrepreneurship are key elements of dynamism of industrial fabric. |
The
job creation generally lies on very few dynamic companies: 3% of the firm
population accounted for 80% of job growth in the U.S between 1991 and
1995 - 6 million out of an additional 7.7 million jobs. Numerous obstacles
have been identified and denounced by different documents, which explain
the relative weakness of the European economies to trigger start-ups and
allow their rapid development. Among others, the group would like to emphasise
that, in most European countries, the economic and social systems present
substantial difficulties for self-employed. The fiscal rules and the social
protection systems do not award risk-taking people. This is particularly
detrimental to entrepreneurship.
The groups recommend that the administrative, legal and financial barriers to the start-ups be effectively removed by the Member-States. A steering group should be established at the European level to assess the effectiveness of the national policies to dismantle these barriers, and to diffuse the best practices. The advent of the Information Society will have in-depth consequences on the work organisation. In the industrial era, the work organisation generally required that employees worked during the same period of time and at the same place. By contrast, in the information age, a major part of value-added is virtual and can be transmitted and stored: temporal and geographical simultaneity of work is no longer a constraint. The only remaining constraint is the time to deliver the customers, which is becoming the critical moment of production. This has several consequences. The concept of weekly working time, symbol of the industrial revolution, is evaporating: the work contracts based on pre-established working time will progressively give way to contracts based on tasks to be achieved. This is exemplified by teleworking. New forms of so-called atypical work are developing, such as temporary, part-time jobs or cyclical work over the year. They fit much better with both the requirements of some specific workers and the need of company for flexibility. In a certain way, demand and supply of labour might match each other with fewer constraints in the information age. Finally, the contractual boundaries between work, leisure and training are blurring. The increasing time spent on learning is likely to be taken from labour, and reduction of commuting time and leisure simultaneously. In future, learning is more likely to take place within a "community" context: in multinational companies with distributed working and learning environments, and in urban or rural localities where widened use of education and cultural resources is made possible by high bandwidth interconnection of schools, colleges, libraries, museums, specialist service providers and industry. Public/private partnership with local ownership is a key factor, and the evolving community context where the "traditional" barriers begin to come down encourages the re-engineering of the organisations concerned as they adapt to new technologies, new ways of working and new responsibilities. Companies, workers and public authorities have to trigger change in the work organisations and training, and share their own part of the burden. Public authorities should ask social partners to negotiate collective agreements allowing work contracts based on the notion of tasks to be fulfilled, rather than on the concept of weekly working time, when appropriate and relevant, in particular for non-manufacturing tasks. Consultation and incentives should be preferred to legislation. The groups recommend that the public authorities guarantee that both advantages and burden of increased flexibility is fairly spread over employers and employees, that flexibility and a learning culture be encouraged, and that the social security protection be not dependent on the differences in types of contracts. Responsibility for training mainly lies with the companies in whose interest it is to invest in their human capital. Because the trained workers might leave and transfer their know-how towards competitors, companies could lessen their effort. To face this risk, some incentives to training are required. The groups recommend that measures, such as fiscal incentives to training, be identified and implemented to raise the level of training by companies. Additionally a system of accreditation should be used to track an individual’s progress in acquiring core skills. This notably concerns ICT skills. It also recommends that training be better valorised in the unfold of professional life. Additionally, flexible organisation of companies requires less and less functional qualifications from the working force, but instead it demands a greater capacity of integration within a networked process of production, and often within a wider cultural context. With the computerisation of most repetitive tasks, the workers will accomplish more and more intelligent tasks requiring initiative, creativity and capability to decide. Efficiency of workers will be less assessed against their individual know-how, but rather against their faculty to work in team and to face multi-facetted tasks. This involves "learning to learn" in new ways. Work in the Information Society is typified by more autonomy for the individual worker, performing an increasing complex combination of subsequent tasks, empowered to do so by the support of more powerful and user-friendly Information and Communications tools. However, the potentialities provided by information technologies cannot be taken for granted: pilot introductions of new ways of working and learning can speed up better understanding of new opportunities, boost the integration of new ICTs in the work process, and encourage re-organisation in the workplace. The groups recommend that the national employment policies be focus as a matter of priority on promoting new ways of working, training people to make the best use of new and advanced ICTs. Working Groups I on "employment" and VI on "lifelong learning" of the Information Society Forum endorse the view that use of state-of-the-art information and communication technologies is vital to job creation. They emphasise the need to promote work reorganisation, and concurrently to develop a culture of learning throughout one’s life. |
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