On the Road to Porto – A solidarity Action Plan for all generations
28 April, 10:00-13:00 | Online
This online European conference “On the Road to Porto – A solidarity Action Plan for all generations” is organised in the framework of the EU funded project ETUCSociAll and in cooperation with the multi-stakeholder Alliance “Stand Up for the Social Pillar”, of which Social Platform is a founding member. It will offer the opportunity to explore the potential of the European Pillar of Social Rights Action plan in facing the social and economic challenges raised by the demographic trends in the European Union, especially with regards to pension policy.
Institutions and stakeholders are invited to contribute and provide responses to all generations, through an integrated approach to ageing as a life-cycle process.
Background
The European Pillar of Social Right Action Plan published on 3 March represents a first step towards EU Social Summit, where the Action Plan will be endorsed. At this stage, it is crucial that all institutions, social partners, governments and civil society organisations both at European and national level are ready to make it a tool for enhanced social and economic well-being and guaranteed common good for all.
The European Pillar of Social Rights must not remain a theoretical list of principles but must be implemented so as to improve the quality of life of all European people in all stages of life. It must foster solutions based on innovativeness, concreteness and ambition, in order to grant enhanced equality, social progress, and improved well-being to all. The Action Plan thus must tackle people’s actual problems in the current and upcoming challenges.
Nowadays, such challenges must be framed in the context of an increasingly ageing society . The EU demographic trends raise a series of societal and economic challenges , for our education paths, labour markets and social protection and especially pension systems.
The Action plan implementing the European Pillar of Social Right can deliver in terms of solidarity and equality-based solutions to the demographic challenge: by enhancing upward convergence on equal opportunities, labour rights, working conditions, wages, social protection systems; by promoting equality, just transition, civil and social dialogue, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy; by making the EU economic governance socially fair and inclusive.
While the demographic trends may put public expenditure for pensions, health and long-term care under pressure, the Action Plan calls for a “demographic change that is fair and just”. In line with the Pillar, it does so by promoting the strict relations among the phases before, during and after the working age – as per a life-cycle approach recalled also by the European Commission Report on Demography and the Green Paper on Ageing. The Action Plan offers policy tools (and precise targets) in support of an ambitious implementation of the Recommendation on Access to Social Protection for workers and the self-employed. By calling for better equal opportunities, higher inclusiveness of the labour markets and a further reflection on how to fund social protection, it enhances the chances to grant more adequate and fiscally sustainable protection to both the present and the future elderly generations.
