Dear members, friends and partners,

In October, the CESI family met after a long time in the beautiful city of Constance, in Germany, on the occasion of the final conference of our EU co-funded “DiWork” project to exchange on the findings of the project regarding the digitalisation process of public services and its impact on workers.

In our first real in situ event outside Brussels after 3 years, we had the chance to discuss about the risks and benefits of digitalisation for the personnel of public services, share experiences and analyse the role of trade unions in this regard. Together with high-level representatives of the European Institutions, politicians representing the local community of Constance and qualified researchers, we tried to give answers to timely questions regarding the future of public services and the suitable approaches regarding the protection of their staff.

The crises of the past years – the September 11 attacks, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2010 European debt crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016, the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and now the war in Ukraine with the energy crisis and soaring inflation have demonstrated that countries with efficient public services are more resilient.

Public services are essential to protect and support citizens, our societies and the economy. They determine whether societies and economies are sustainable and competitive. They protect the most vulnerable members of our society and improve citizens’ prosperity and well-being. Public services care, protect and deliver.

Especially during the pandemic, it became clear that well-performing public services require digitalised work organisation and digitalised service provision. Digitalization provides public services with new opportunities to perform changes that have not been possible in the past and helps them meet public expectations and become more efficient and resilient.

Similarly, digitalised work organisation and digitalised service provision require workers and their representatives not only to accept them – but to actively shape and co-design them. Workers and their representatives have the knowledge and experience needed to make digitalisation be beneficial not only for themselves but also for the functioning of the services.

But to do so, the workforce of public services must be skilled, well-equipped, prepared – and, of course, protected. And this is exactly what trade unions and social partners should focus on in this new era. As Elisa Ferreira, European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms, stated on the conference, “(social) partners are the key ingredient (of the digitalisation process).”

In this frame, CESI should be really proud of its efforts to offer adequate protection to the personnel of public services with the new landmark European social partner agreement on the protection of the workforce in central government administrations in the digital era, which CESI co-negotiated and signed slightly before the conference.

Constance showed us that public services need investments, equipment, and modernisation – and all these elements depend on digitalisation.

This conference may have been the final step of a 2-year journey full of lessons and experiences, but in fact, it marked the beginning of new collective efforts and fights towards stronger, more efficient, sustainable, resilient and well-performing public services.