Conference Agenda

In June 2023, the International Labour Organization (ILO) is expected to adopt a new international standard: the Recommendation on Quality Apprenticeships. The Recommendation’s aims are to both promote apprenticeships and ensure apprentices’ effective protection. The broader, ambitious, aspirations of the ILO are that the Recommendation, and the domestic legal frameworks it is designed to elicit, will play a significant role across the globe in reducing youth unemployment and underemployment; ensuring decent work, especially for young people; reducing skills and shortages, including those exacerbated by the contemporary pressures on working life (most notably climate change); and combatting inequalities, including by facilitating transitions from the informal to the formal economy.

The Recommendation will be the first international standard on apprenticeships since 1962 and the latest chapter in the evolution of ILO standard-setting in the era of interlinked crises. It will embody a model regulatory framework that merges a set of standards to denote ‘quality’ apprenticeships, a call to promote equality and diversity, and measures to promote both national and sub-national apprenticeship regimes and firm/organisation-level opportunities.

The RDW Conference will be held in the immediate aftermath of the adoption of this milestone standard. This Special Session would therefore be the first opportunity for a crucial reflection among researchers and policy-makers on the promises, advances, and limitations of the new international regime. The Session will respond to the question posed in the Call for Abstracts: ‘What will a new ILO apprenticeships standard add to ongoing efforts to support youth employment?’ It will situate the new standard within the Conference theme of Regulatory innovation in an era of crises by highlighting the Recommendation as among contemporary labour policy’s novel regulatory strategies and within an unfairly neglected area of labour scholarship, especially in relation to regulation/rights.

The Session panel will be composed of globally-leading experts: the ILO Employment Policy Director and the Official who is leading the standard-setting process, the Expert Legal Advisors on the Recommendation, and an internationally-renowned apprenticeship researchers. The Session will explore the Recommendation’s key features; the domestic regulatory and promotional frameworks it envisages; its potential to reduce youth unemployment, protect young workers, and provide lifelong learning; and how it complements and enhances the International Legal Standards.

The Session will also tease out the new instrument’s submerged themes. It will highlight that these themes provide contributions to the debates on the future of work that are both crucial and overlooked, and that include the evolution of ILO standard-setting in the era of interlinked crises; conceptions of ‘informality’ in the Global North and South that are revealed by regulatory projects at the international level; and the drivers and curbs of precariousness on labour market entry and transition. This Session will explore these themes through a fruitful and wide-ranging interdisciplinary and research/policy dialogue.

Schedule:

4.35-4.40 Opening Remarks – Deirdre McCann

4.40-4.55 Presentation - Andrew Stewart

4.55-5.02 Discussant 1 – Ashwani Aggarwal

5.02-5.17 Presentation - Patrick Daru

5.17-5.25 Questions

5.25-5.40 Presentation - Jeff Bridgford

5.40-5.47 Discussant 2 - Vicki Donlevy

5.47-5.55 Questions

5.55-6.00 Closing Remarks – Sangheon Lee

The complete papers and slides for this Session are available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1idQNJgsaTcoH9KgdP0r65e8XUpaEO3ag

The Quality Apprenticeships Recommendation is a landmark instrument: the first international standard on apprenticeships since the 1960s, it marks a new emphasis in the international normative realm on youth unemployment/underemployment, and on decent work for young workers and in labour market entry/transition. This paper situates the Recommendation within the broader evolution of labour law in an era of sequential crises, emphasising that the instrument is a site of regulatory innovation. In doing so, the paper argues that labour market entrance/transition is a neglected arena in labour regulation/rights scholarship. The paper reflects upon the resonance of key features of the Recommendation within broader debates on labour regulation in ‘the future of work.’ These include notions of ‘quality’ and ‘decent work’ as they are being articulated in the apprenticeship debates and the modes in which the informality/formality transition is foreseen in the Recommendation in both the Global North and South.

In his role as Team Lead on Skills Delivery and co-supporting technically ILO constituents on Quality Apprenticeships, the author will explore the significance of the new Recommendation and its most important contributions in designing a framework for decent work in apprenticeships across the world. To that end, the paper will explore the instrument’s recommendations for the introduction and reform of apprenticeship regimes in ILO member States; its likely influence in a range of countries and regions; and its potential to close skills gaps, reduce youth unemployment, and protect young workers and others through labour market entries and transitions.

This paper will offer the first comparison of the new ILO Recommendation with the most significant transitional instrument, the Council of the European Union Recommendation on a European Framework for Quality and Effective Apprenticeships (EFQEA). Five years since the adoption of the EFQEA - and a decade since the establishment of the European Alliance for Apprenticeships (EAfA) – the paper will identify the most significant ways in which the Recommendation and the European apprenticeship frameworks intersect and diverge. Drawing on his long experience as an advisor to the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and a Senior Expert for the European Commission’s Apprenticeship Support Services, the author will assess how each instrument conceptualises quality apprenticeships, regulatory frameworks, and the role of the social partners, and will explore how the new international instrument is likely to influence European frameworks and debates on quality apprenticeships.