ETRMA part of Euro job skills council

BRUSSELS (Feb. 9, 2015)  — The European Association of Automotive Suppliers is working with other trade groups and trade unions to address European employment policies regarding automotive trade skills.

CLEPA, the project leader, will collaborate for the next 18 months with the European Tyre & Rubber Manufacturers Association (ETRMA) and the European trade union IndustriAll to create a European platform for discussing employment policies, according to the two trade groups.

The groups held their first networking event for its new Automotive Skills Council Jan. 28 at the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels.

The first networking event, “Growth and Employment,” was designed to identify potential members of the Automotive Skills Council, as well as the right partners in various European countries, the ETRMA said.

“Unemployment remains a thorn in the side of many governments and a plague for younger generations, and therefore the work of this skills council for the automotive sector is all the more important,” said Fazilet Cinaralp, ETRMA secretary general.

“This is just the beginning of the process and we look forward to a fruitful cooperation and to the creation of a pool of experience and expertise that will help us in our future labor market challenges.”

Ms. Cinaralp pointed out the European tire sector provides employment for about 400,000 workers at 90 plants and 16 research and development centers, investing more than $3 billion annually in R&D.

Among the challenges the ETRMA sees are cyclical generational changes in the workforce and access to suitably skilled workforce in order to avoid skills shortages and mismatches.

From the ERTMA's perspective, the objective of the initiative is threefold:

• Identify the industry's drivers of change for the long term, in order for the relevant actors to be able to respond with ad hoc educational and training programs.
• Build national platforms to support and evaluate ongoing initiatives aimed at obtaining more effective interactions between business and schools.
• Help map the training resources available and build upon existing synergies towards the creation of stronger, more integrated clusters that could benefit the sector as a whole, by optimizing existing resources and maybe supporting the creation of new ones.

The Automotive Skills Council will collect data on skills needed in the auto industry and contribute to mapping which jobs will appear or disappear in the future, the ETRMA said.

The initiative, co-funded by the European Commission under the Progress Program, is part of the conclusions of the CARS2020 report, which sets the basis for a predictable regulatory framework for the automotive industry in the next decades.

The next networking events will take place in Paris on June 24 and in Rome on Oct. 1. The final conference will be in Brussels in February 2016.

Brussels-based CLEPA represents 110 car parts, systems and modules suppliers and 24 national trade associations and European sector associations, which in turn represent more than 3,000 companies employing more than 5 million workers.

The industriAll European trade union represents 7.1 million workers across supply chains in manufacturing, mining and energy sectors on the European level through 200 affiliated organizations from 39 European countries.