site.btaDigital Transformation Changes Labour Market Very Fast - Trade Union Leader Says

"We are seeing how the digital transformation is changing the labour market very fast, but not necessarily towards greater security," the President of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB), Plamen Dimitrov, said here on Thursday during the 3rd annual scientific conference of the Institute for Social and Trade Union Studies, held with the help of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bulgaria. The theme of the forum was economic transformation in the context of green and digital transition - trends and challenges.

Very often new forms of work are also unprotected, the most striking example being work through platforms, Dimitrov said. He recalled that the European Parliament adopted the directive on working through online platforms, adding that the International Labour Organisation is preparing a convention and a recommendation on the social and labour protection of workers through digital labour platforms. The first international legal act concerning this is expected in 2026, Dimitrov added. He said the number of people working through platforms will continue to grow.

Dimitrov said he wasn't overly excited about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). "I believe we should be more reserved because there are key processes that at some point become irreversible," he explained. Regarding the Green Deal, the CITUB President said that it is undergoing "some changes" in order to be able to achieve the set results for the economy and energy, but also to ensure the protection of jobs. The Institute and CITUB are doing something very important for the green transition, namely to map the skills of those directly employed in coal regions and related suppliers and subcontractors, said Plamen Dimitrov. "At the beginning of next year we will have personal files of all these 15,000 people with their skills, and also their wishes - what they want to learn, how they want to develop," he explained.

The transition should be socially tolerable, said Kalina Drenska from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Bulgaria, who recalled that the word "transition" does not have a particularly positive connotation. The topic of green and digital transition was part of one of the panels at the conference, which was attended by lecturers from the University of National and World Economy, scientists from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and experts.

One of the topics during the forum was demographics. In the words of Lyuboslav Kostov, director of the Institute for Social and Trade Union Studies and chief economist at CITUB, the data show that by the end of this century Europe's population will decrease by several dozen million at a time when the population in all other continents is growing. "We will be in a situation where the European population will be less than 7% of the global population," Kostov said. Although we all think that the planet is overpopulated, we will end up with a situation in which, as a result of digitalisation and new technologies, countries with a high standard of living will have a low birth rate and those with a not so high standard of living will have a high birth rate, the economist also said.