No. 1/1999
|
|
No. 1/1999 |
|
The "Mouvement des entreprises de France" (MEDEF): the new name of the French employers' association, formerly the "Conseil national de patronat français" (CNPF), was announced at its convention de Strasbourg on 27 October 1998. At the same convention, the former National Council also remoulded its charter, which had barely been altered since the association was founded in 1946. It unveiled a new logo in the colours of France and Europe, featuring three human faces representing "those without whom no enterprise can exist": the entrepreneur, the employee and the shareholder.
MEDEF's executive council, enlarged to include more representatives of the national network, has been radically remoulded to make it "a body truly representative of the French enterprise". Its work will be more effectively channelled through the 600 trade associations, 85 federations and 165 local unions in its membership. The Strasbourg convention was the culmination of a process dubbed "en avant l'entreprise" ("forward with the enterprise"), the broad-ranging consultation of heads of enterprises launched in 1998 by Ernest-Antoine Seillière, President of the organisation. MEDEF intends to promote the entrepreneurial spirit. In the economic and social parts of its plan, it puts forward state reform as an absolute priority. It calls for less aid for employment and relief from certain social contributions, with a plea for an extended, decentralised social dialogue. Lastly, it wants to see "a redefinition of parity representation to give the social partners genuine decision-making power". Quite apart from social protection, there are new fields of action to explore, especially training and education which represent the "true parity of tomorrow", in order to bring them closer to the entrepreneurial world. In this setting, the "training days" organised by the former CNPF in Deauville on 7-9 October 1998 provided an opportunity to present a range of personal testimony and expertise from within the employers' movement on the theme of competences. The idea was that performance arises not from training as such but from the reorganisation of work and a new form of skills management. According to Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the enterprise and the employee working there will both benefit from training. The firm has to adapt very rapidly, generate ideas and transform them into services. For the worker, "the skills acquired and recognised in the workplace are the true guarantee of success in his working life". "Today a person's job security is no longer imposed by the Labour Code but earned by that person's employability", pointed out the chairman of the training committee, Bruno Lacroix. According to this concept, an employee "can progress by broadening his skills". In practice, "the head of an enterprise states his priorities under his firm's training policy. He accepts any request that reflects the priorities. Training may or may not take place during paid working hours, since it is a tool whereby the employee can exercise his own personal management of his employability". In his closing speech, Bruno Lacroix called upon the social partners to become, at national level, "the developers of a vocational qualification policy", through the creation of real fora for surveying the evolution of occupations. "They must also determine the criteria and conditions for the evaluation of qualifications, by giving their consent to evaluation bodies and monitoring their work - whether those qualifications have been acquired in the initial training setting or throughout people's working lives". One of the eleven workshops held for these 'training days 98' was on international practice in the area of competences. It was possible to identify five common values in the 22+ countries represented:
For further information: |
 |
 |