In June 2022, COFACE and Pro Parents Netherlands organised an Expert meeting on gender equality, sustainability and workplace well-being.

Working families around the globe were dramatically impacted by the changes COVID-19 brought. Increasing anxieties around job security, mounting home schooling demands, and radical birth and postpartum plan shifts have taken the small safety net around families away.

We are still in the phase of covid recovery, gearing up for the next normal in work and life.

There is an opportunity to build back better and coordinate a societal shift both at home and in the workplace. We need to redefine the future of work and how we envision care and work.

How are caretaking responsibilities organised to ensure that people with care responsibilities (mostly women and or mothers, but also family members who take care of elderly relatives or relatives with disabilities) are properly represented in the workplace.

With the Sustainable Development Goals 1 (no poverty), 3 (health and well-being), 5 (gender equality) and 8 (decent work and economic growth) in mind, the objective of this European expert meeting was to create the building blocks for a caring economy by:

• connecting families, policy-makers and employers in order to collect best practices for family-friendly workplaces and create European guidelines to help employers create a culture shift;
• upscaling good practices from The Netherlands to other countries, and encourage further cross-country exchanges;
• preparing the future of work to deal with labour market challenges due to gender inequality and the lack of appropriate work life balance measures, such as female under-representation, absenteeism, loss of talent and talent shortages, mental health issues and more;
• studying solutions to improve gender equality in the labour market;
• boosting the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan, namely principles 2 (gender equality), 3 (equal opportunities) and 9 (work-life balance).

See full meeting report here 

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Using the COFACE Child Compass as a starting point, we organised a European expert meeting in Ljubljana in March 2022 focused on the features of large families and the challenges they experience in Europe today, taking stock of the situation in different countries and collecting good practices.

The reflections were based on the premise that all children must have equal opportunities and be treated equally regardless of their family settings, and modern 21^st century family support systems should be able to factor in this diversity of needs without discrimination.

This European expert meeting was held in hybrid format (offline/online) for COFACE members, local participants in Slovenia, and EU stakeholders working on similar goals.

The objectives of this expert meeting were to:

• Connect the Slovenian and European realities on families;
• Build on the findings of the 2020 COFACE expert meeting on single parent families and large families;
• Collection of information on changing patterns in large families of today, including blended and recomposed families;
• Consulting national/regional/local level of the civil society on innovative practices in supports to large families;
• Encourage knowledge transfer across EU countries on promoting the rights of families and children;
• Develop common actions and positions, to mainstream the family perspective in EU policy discussions on the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan, the EU child guarantee, the transposition of the EU Work-life balance directive, the EU Child Rights strategy and more.

See full meeting report here

The post Key findings on large families appeared first on COFACE Families Europe.

On the 15th of December 2020, the European Commission published an initial proposal for a Regulation entitled the “Digital Services Act”. COFACE Families Europe has been following the development of this piece of legislation from the start, and responded to the initial consultation launched by the Commission.

As it stands, the current Digital Services Act proposal includes some notable progress, especially in the areas of advertising and online safety, but it also fails at addressing many issues such as pushing for easier data portability or empowering users of digital services platforms.

This short assessment first assessed to what extend COFACE proposals are reflected in the DSA, and secondly highlights articles which are important from a civil society perspective.

See full assessment here

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