EFFAT

EFFAT is the European Trade Union Federation that represents workers in the food, agriculture, tourism and domestic sectors. It represents millions of vulnerable workers, particularly those in seasonal roles within agriculture and tourism. Many of these workers are migrants or mobile workers who struggle to find affordable, decent housing.

Training, upskilling and reskilling are key to adapt to the challenges of climate change and the new working methods that the green transition and digitalisation may require. But there is also a crucial need to secure workers income and protect health and safety from high temperatures and other extreme weather events.

Climate change is increasingly exposing workers to occupational heat stress, and this entails significant implications for their safety and health. Heat exposure can pose significant risks to the safety and health of workers, particularly those engaged in outdoor or physically demanding jobs.

Land use sectors encompasses economic activities whose employees are represented by EFFAT such as agriculture and forestry. Forests are suffering massively and increasingly from climate change. Drought and pests are causing enormous damages, impairing the performance of forestry as a whole.

Since 2020, when the meat sector became a vector for the spread of Covid-19 due to the poor working and living conditions faced by meat workers exploited in subcontracting chains and by un-scrupulous labour intermediaries, EFFAT has called for a binding EU legal framework on subcon-tracting and labour intermediation.

Excluding Social Conditionality from Crisis Payments Sets Risky Precedent FFAT expresses serious concern over todays European Commissions reported proposal to exclude social conditionality from the complementary crisis payments outlined in newly proposed Article 41a of the Strategic Plan Regulation (SPR).

The potential of the CAP to address social injustice remains underutilised by Member States. Working in European agriculture is dangerous. The number of fatal accidents in the agriculture sector is deplorably high. Estimates shows that around 500 fatal accidents occur in the agriculture sector per year. Agriculture also accounts for over 150,000 non-fatal accidents annually.

As labour mobility and migration are increasingly intertwined, enforcement must address this reality. Therefore, ELA's remit should be extended to cover the Seasonal Workers Directive, the Employers' Sanctions Directive, and the Anti-Trafficking Directive.