European Telework Information Day Brussels - 28th May 1998 Report By Jeremy Millard ETD Programme Manager

The Newark Declaration: a Contribution from the Information Society Forum to the Employment Debate

Mr. Johnston introduced Mr. Majó by explaining that the Information Society Forum is an independent unit, set up jointly by the Council of Ministers and the European Commission about three years ago, as a deliberate attempt to foster a much broader and independent view of Information Society developments. Its membership includes individuals from all walks of life and all interests, including industry, the trades unions, employers' organisations, as well as special interest groups of all types. The Forum is thus very different as a source of policy advice than anything else at European level. Given its 130 members, it is very difficult to obtain a consensus, but despite this the six working groups have convincingly succeeded in pursuing their objectives. Mr. Majó is the Chairman of one of the most active working groups concerned with the top policy issue of how the Information Society will affect employment in Europe and how can it be made to maximise beneficial impacts.

Mr. Majó explained that the Employment and Job Creation Working Group (WG) has been considering telework a great deal, even though it is not its main concern. The WG originally had a broader remit across economic and growth issues but has tended to focus down strongly on employment and jobs because of the political concerns surrounding them. After the Amsterdam decision, the European Union established a more dynamic approach to employment policies, including six-monthly high level summits on employment, and this has opened the possibility for a more productive relationship between the IS Forum and the European Union. The Forum created a parallel process in which every six months the WG issues an advice paper feeding directly into the summit schedule, and thus into the highest levels of policy development in Europe. These papers have come to be known as declarations, so that just before the Luxembourg Summit in December 1997 the Barcelona Declaration was issued as the WG met in that city in November 1997. Similarly in May 1998, the WG has issued the Newark Declaration in anticipation of the forthcoming Cardiff Summit in June 1998.

The European Union has strongly welcomed these declarations and has encouraged the WG to continue the pattern and particularly to create a continuing dynamic dialogue, so that the Newark Declaration now builds positively on the earlier Barcelona Declaration. One of the continuing themes is to try to rectify a serious failure by complementing the mainly passive employment policies hitherto adopted in Europe (such as helping the unemployed rather than looking to create jobs), with more active approaches. In addition, the WG points to a second important failure as the general lack of understanding of what is happening to employment. This means that even active policies do not take sufficient account of employment change which is so profound and rapid that a completely new economic situation is being created which demands new types of policy.

The WG's declarations therefore attempt to develop new insights into how things are changing. The Barcelona Declaration concentrated upon explaining the new relations between growth and employment in order to counter the fallacy that growth alone will solve employment problems. This was done, firstly, by showing the difficulties there are in increasing growth beyond a certain limit, and secondly by stressing that growth is far from the only factor concerned in employment. Further, the relationship between technology, productivity, growth and employment is very complex and any simplistic approach to the problem is very dangerous, especially in the fast changing context of globalisation and new business strategies.

Mr. Majó explained that the WG is convinced that the promotion of the Information Society has to be one of the key pillars of a successful European employment policy, a situation which does not yet exist. The challenge for Europe is to develop the necessary conditions to fully exploit the job potential of the Information Society. The WG argues that the dynamics of growth in the coming years will be completely different compared to those we have known until now, because new economic conditions are present, including those relating to environmental issues and globalisation. Productivity will probably increase faster than growth, leaving no room for important new employment. In addition, it is estimated that between 8 to 9 million Europeans are actually discouraged from seeking a job because of the high level of unemployment. In this context, any growth upturn is likely first to increase the rate of participation and only partially affect the unemployment rate. Growth is indeed a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Given this situation, the Information Society should be considered not only as a fact but also as a tool for European employment policies - indeed it is, or should be, at the root of sustainable growth.

The Barcelona Declaration concluded that market forces alone will not solve Europe's problems in adopting the Information Society, nor in eliminating unemployment. Given this, public authorities have a key role, but this does not mean that more money is needed as budgetary resources already exist at all levels for new active employment measures to prepare people and organisations for the Information Society. Present budgetary resources are, at present, very often used in the wrong way.

The Newark Declaration does not repeat the main messages of the Barcelona Declaration, except to say that any active policy should take account of the new circumstances, especially those relating to the need for a renewal of skills through education and training and the need to reorganise work. From being a simple contributor to job creation, the Information Society must become a genuine driver and should shape employment and learning policies. Globalisation and the emergence of the Information Society is forcing companies to adapt their productive organisation more rapidly and consistently through a continuous upgrading of employee skills.

Up until the present, the natural demographic turnover in the workforce, at about 2-3% per annum, has been sufficient to meet changing skill demands. But today this is too slow to meet companies' requirements, estimated at over 10% skills change per year. Expert assessment predicts that the majority of jobs which will exist in ten years' time are not known today. Thus, the knowledge and skill cycle needs to be speeded up, and the WG recommends that this is done by implementing systems of life-long learning, both in relation to training within companies as well as in wider educational systems. It is important that, in the future, people are empowered to be able to learn throughout their lives, and that as part of this, information society technologies can be used as a necessary tool for learning. This is necessary to enable companies to be able to respond rapidly and effectively to the unpredictable changes to which they are increasingly subject.

The advent of the Information Society will have deep consequences for work organisation. In the industrial era, work generally required employees to work at a common place and time. By contrast, in the Information Society a major part of work content is virtual, i.e. it can be transmitted and stored. As a consequence, temporal and geographical simultaneity is no longer a constraint, and the only one now remaining is time to deliver a product or service. This has several consequences. First, the concept of a standard working week is evaporating, so that, for example, contracts based on a fixed working time are gradually giving way to contracts based on tasks to be achieved, as exemplified in teleworking. Second, new forms of, what has been until now, atypical work are developing, such as telework, temporary work, part-time jobs, cyclical work over the year, etc. What is today called atypical work will simply become work. These new kinds of work fit much better, both with the requirements of specific workers and the needs of companies for flexibility. In such work, the supply and demand of labour match each other with fewer constraints.

Mr. Majó concluded by emphasising that the contractual boundaries between work, leisure and training are blurring. The increasing time spent on learning is likely to be taken from all these three simultaneously. In future, learning is more likely to take place within a community context, including the company itself and virtual communities. One important recommendation here is that public authorities should request that the social partners negotiate collective agreements, when appropriate to do so, allowing work contracts based on the notion of tasks to be fulfilled rather than on the concept of weekly working time. Responsibility for training mainly lies, of course, with companies as they have an interest in investing in their human capital. However, because trained workers might leave and transfer their knowledge to competitors, there is, what economists call, a negative externality involved, so that companies may be tempted to lessen their efforts. In order to counter this risk, incentives need to be given to companies.

WG1 on Employment and WG6 on Learning and Education both hold the view that the use of state-of-the-art information society technologies is vital for job creation. Both emphasise the need to promote work reorganisation, the acceptance of new ways of work and, at the same time, to develop a culture of learning throughout the whole of life.

Mr.Johnston, thanking Mr. Majó for his contribution, noted the remarkable achievement reached by the Mr. Majó's Working Group as he knows from personal experience the great difficulty in reconciling the objectives of both achieving consensus in a diverse group and of producing a set of clear and strong ideas. Another advantage of the Forum's independence is that it has a direct route to the highest levels of policy development in Europe.