The young generation needs quality traineeships

Abstract

Traineeships are part and parcel of the transition from education to work. Trainees, however, are easily trapped on the labour market’s precarious edge. And traineeships exemplify how access to work has become increasingly individualised, placing responsibility on the individual to find work. Be it due to lack of payment, exclusion from labour rights or weak bargaining power, trainees often fall outside labour regulation. And such regulation as there is varies greatly across the European Union. A European coalition has therefore called forthrightly for binding EU regulation to ensure traineeship quality—in particular, banning unpaid traineeships. In March, the European Commission responded with a proposal for a directive ‘improving and enforcing working conditions of trainees and combating regular employment relationships disguised as traineeships’. The Council of the EU published a progress report on it last month and a council working party is set to discuss the proposal further this week. The directive would complement a non-binding quality framework for traineeships which, since 2014, has promoted quality standards through the European Semester and uses EU funding as a lever for domestic regulatory alignment. The framework is itself up for revision.