European Commission publishes proposal for “Soil Monitoring Law”

On 5 July, the European Commission published a proposal for a “Soil Monitoring Law“, 17 years after the last proposal on healthy soils. Under the new Directive, Member States would be required to regularly monitor and assess the health of their soils according to a list of indicators.

Moreover, the proposal foresees to introduce new EU-wide definitions for “artificial land” and “land take”.

For construction, the newly proposed land take and soil sealing indicators would be particularly relevant. With this new legislation, the Commission is also proposing measures for sustainable soil management, including “land take mitigation principles”, and measures for the identification and management of contaminated sites.

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Taxonomy is becoming common market practice, says EU Finance Commissioner

On 6 July, the European Commissioner for Financial Services, Financial Stability and the Capital Markets Union, Mairead McGuinness, spoke at a joint meeting hosted at the European Parliament by the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI).According to Commissioner McGuinness, the EU taxonomy is becoming – day by day – a “common market practice” in the Union. She also said that the European Commission’s aim was to finalise and officially publish the Environmental Delegated Act in the Official Journal of the EU before the end of 2023. The Environmental Delegated Act will introduce new circular economy technical criteria for the construction sector.

FELM Project – Final deliverables online

FIEC and EFBWW have recently finished the joint Social Dialogue project, “The Future of the European Labour Market in Construction” (FELM). The EU-funded project produced a quantitative analysis and 6 case studies to assess the effect of the increased number of Third country national (TCN) companies and workers in the EU construction labour market.

Based on the project findings, FIEC and EFBWW developed a list of Joint Recommendations to address the challenges and opportunities posed by the presence of non-EU workers and companies in the European construction sector. All final deliverables (Joint Recommendations, Report and Executive Summary) are available on FIEC website.

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New project on Social ID Cards in Construction

FIEC and EFBWW, the EU sectoral Social Partners of the construction industry, started a new joint project “Social Identity Cards in Construction” (SIDE-CIC) funded by the European Commission.

The objective of these Social ID cards is to facilitate the enforcement of EU rules, create a more transparent environment for workers, employers, and labour authorities and to foster fairer mobility of labour in the construction sector.

With this project FIEC and EFBWW aim at :

  1. Mapping the current situation of social identity cards in the EU, particularly as they pertain to the construction sector.
  2. Carrying out a feasibility study, focusing on the interconnectivity of the existing national schemes and contributing to defining the needs and possible regulatory gaps in the EU framework. The study will address two main aspects: the legal and technical framework.

 

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Visit of Japanese researchers

FIEC was pleased to welcome a Japanese delegation from the Research Institute of Construction and Economy (RICE) – based in Tokyo – that visited the Federation’s Brussels offices on 30 June.

The aim was to present and discuss about the developments of the construction sector and the main challenges ahead. Despite the distance between our respective continents the exchanges highlighted many common global concerns, in particular :

  • The ageing workforce
  • The difficulty of attracting young people and women
  • Labour shortages and skills gap
  • The need to invest in skills (training, upskilling, reskilling).

 

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Summary version of our Annual Report 2022 is now online

You can find it on FIEC Website and download the file in PDF at this link. This is a brief version (summary) of our full Annual Report 2022.

 

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FIEC Newsletter soon “on holidays”
Back on 5 September!

We look forward to sharing more news and interesting highlights in a few weeks…and wish all our readers a relaxing and sunny break!