digitalisation

On World Youth Skills Day 2020, the ETF highlights the need for quality training, skills, room for professional development to attract young workers to the transport sector, but above all emphasises the need for decent working conditions!

A new report of the SkillSea project confirms that digitisation and modern technologies have been rapidly changing the maritime sector in recent years. European maritime professionals, both at sea and ashore, need more digital and soft skills to stay ahead of the industry.

As part of the SkillSea project, a new report was released - Current Skills Needs: Reality and Mapping. Researchers surveyed more than 1,600 maritime professionals – 1,149 seafarers and 474 shore-based personnel - to get their views on the adequacy of current maritime training and education and what they consider to be the most important skills needs.

The social partners in urban public transport, ETF and UITP, the International Association of Public Transport, held the workshop "Digital transformation in customer services and its impact on work in urban public transport" last week in Vienna. Trade unionists and employers spent two days discussing the impact of digitalisation on the public transport sector. The role of trade unions is indispensable in these ongoing transformations, and we are committed and up to the challenge!

On 14 January, the European Commission launched First phase consultation of Social Partners on a possible action addressing the challenges related to fair minimum wages. While the ETF strongly believes that workers of Europe need a pay rise, we don’t support simplistic approaches and half-baked solutions that could endanger the autonomy of social partners around the continent. A simple prescriptive mechanism cannot solve wage stagnation – instead, we need to address the core causes of it, such as precarious work, anti-union measures, digitalisation, and austerity.

On 11 and 12 December, workers and union representatives from the water transport sectors met in Hamburg for a workshop on automation and digitalisation. The workshop is part of the project ETF Automation & Digitalisation Toolkit, aimed at developing tools to empower workers during the processes of automation and digitalization (A&D).

Our pilot’s representatives learned that the aviation industry is pushing for single-pilot operations to be technologically feasible from mid-2020. The ETF expresses its great concern on this evolution of the air transport sector.

ETF and UITP, the International Association of Public Transport, held the workshop "Digital transformation in maintenance and its impact on work in urban public transport" on 20 and 21 November 2019 in Paris to discuss the impact of digitalisation on the public transport sector.

Digitalisation and automation are affecting a multitude of transport jobs in all sectors. However, jobs carried out by women are particularly at risk due to digitalisation and automation which threaten to deepen existing gender inequalities in the workplace even further.