In our role as an education provider, we offer more than 70 seminars a year on a variety of issues related to workers’ questions - including work mobility, sustainability and demographic change. Maintaining the focus on Europe is important to us. Therefore our educational activities are held in 30 different countries. Overview:
We are pleased to present our educational programme “European Social Dialogue” 2023/24.
Our capacity building for workers’ organizations makes EZA an important European training provider in line with the European Commission’s Social Dialogue Initiative published in late January.
The Covid-19 pandemic is now essentially behind us, and we are delighted that the EZA educational work can resume as “normal”. Success in educational work depends in particular on a physical presence, which was one of the lessons learned from the pandemic. Nevertheless, we should praise the EZA member centres for having made such positive use of the surge in online activities, as online services in addition or as a supplement to face-to-seminar work are now second nature.
However, the effects of the war in Ukraine, which has now been raging for over a year, are apparent in almost all the seminars in the EZA education programme. EZA and many of our members are supporting our Ukrainian member centre, Vost Volya, with expressions of solidarity and a range of activities. Now that Ukraine has attained EU candidate status, EZA will be able to offer even stronger support to our Ukrainian partners in capacity building in the future. The war is also influencing the themes of the seminars: over the past year we have all seen high inflation rates throughout Europe, the problems of maintaining purchasing power, supply chain issues for companies, Europe’s dependence on an external energy supply and the consequences of this, etc. These aspects ultimately have a direct impact on the realities of the lives and working conditions of workers in Europe.
This is also reflected in the EZA Education Programme 2023/24, which is divided into eleven thematic groups. Thematic focal points are the Twin Transition (European Green Deal / Digitisation), “Decent working conditions and decent wages” and “Democracy and rule of law as a basis for the work of workers’ organisations in Europe”. Other topics will include the European recovery plan, integration in the labour market, equal opportunities, the situation of young people in the labour market, quality education as a prerequisite for decent work, occupational health and safety, and capacity building for workers’ organisations. The special project for workers’ organisations in the Western Balkans will also be continued, in particular as there is a new EU candidate country in the region, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The target group for our training seminars are multipliers from trade unions and other workers’ organisations, notably young professionals.
