This workshop was the last of a series of national workshops organised as part of the ValueFacturing SMEs project. It was aimed at promoting best practices in the context of social dialogue and furthering the expertise and knowledge of project partners and European-level cross-sectoral social partners and labour market stakeholders while outlining the progress in the research developed during the course of the project.

The Macro-objectives of this workshop were:

• Building on national experiences, contributing to social dialogue (not only national but also European) by bringing the specific issues addressed in the project to the attention of the social partners involved.
• Producing a multilingual decalogue containing practical procedures and guidelines for social dialogue at company, sectoral and European levels. The aim is to replicate best practices and collective bargaining initiatives in other EU countries to improve the quality of labour markets and thus promote the competitiveness of global value chains.
• Facilitating dialogue between employer organisations and trade unions (especially in contexts where industrial relations are underdeveloped) to improve the benefits to SMEs of effective and quality sectoral social dialogue.

Project Background

The Project aims to increase the competitiveness of SMEs in the manufacturing sector in global value chains through social dialogue. This will be done by investigating and fostering sectoral social dialogue practices (at both national and European levels) that can contribute to improving the quality of the European labour market to boost its attractiveness for starting and developing small and medium-sized enterprises.