Automotive

The automobile industry and its suppliers are major providers of jobs in the European Union. The car sector is also an important contributor to EU’s prosperity, innovation capacity and employees’ skills upgrading.

However, the sector is undergoing considerable transformation and harmful restructuring exercises translating into tremendous pressures on workers and working conditions everywhere. Typically, whenever a production site closes, its suppliers are left with no other choice than to close in its wake, leaving thousands of employees jobless and with reduced prospects of improving their standards of living.

The recent shifts in production and the important investments realised by major automobile manufacturers outside the EU, in Russia, India, Iran, etc. puts European employees in the sector under further pressures and threatens the sustainability of the European car industry.

In this particular context, and recognising the common interest of all employees in Europe, in improved working conditions and better wages as well as increased competitiveness to safeguard jobs and competences, the EMF strives to coordinate trade union approaches in order to respond to companies strategies aiming at playing employees and production sites against one another.

The EMF also recognises that in the face of environmental challenges and competitive pressures from outside Europe, increased R&D efforts are needed to create more and better jobs.

Such effort will only be possible if an audacious industrial policy is developed at EU and national levels to support or complement R&D spending already undertaken by companies themselves. This European industrial policy must also take into account the emergence of new players in the globalised economy which are not playing by the same rules and who are EU’s main trading partners.

The EMF contributes to feeding EU policy initiative in the field of social affairs, industrial policy and other policy areas having a link to the car industry (environment, education and training, transport policy etc.).

For more information, contact Tony Murphy, Company Policy Director.