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EMF, French Nuclear Group Areva Sign Worker Training, Evolution Accord

10 April, 2011

The European Metalworkers’ Federation (EMF) and Areva, the Paris-based nuclear power and nuclear service provider, signed a protocol agreement on 1 April intended to facilitate career enhancement and employee competencies within the 13 European countries that Areva operates in.

Entitled “Memorandum of Agreement on Professions and Competences Forecast,” the protocol framework is the second that EMF and Areva have adopted, the first being a 2006 Equal Opportunities pact that a European Commission (EC) project now oversees.

The new agreement is intended to forecast and manage career development of Areva staff by providing training, work-life balance, mobility, transfer of knowledge throughout the company, as well as giving a positive work environment across a person’s entire employment career with Areva.

(See the EMF announcement and the 12-page agreement.)

The three-year agreement will be tracked under a separate EC project called Forecasting and Anticipating Competencies in Europe through Social Dialogue (FACES). The protocol calls for an annual appraisal that will “articulate the positioning of the employee in such a way that their qualifications and their payment is in relation to their level of competencies and performance.”

The agreement states that such assessments will not conflict with existing national collective bargaining agreements.

It commits the company to develop a training policy in step with the needs of workers “to both preserve and renew competencies in order to have the best possible career evolution.” Each of Areva’s 35,000 workers in Europe will have access to 30 hours of training per annum, which can be allotted over three years.

The agreement’s overall monitoring device is a committee of Areva management and the European Works Council Select Committee, which will evaluate and present the results yearly to the EMF.

Areva is a ten-year-old company that was formed through a three-way merger between CEA-Industrie, COGEMA, and Framatome to combine the French Government's interests in several nuclear power and information technology businesses. CEA-Industrie, (Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique or French Atomic Energy Commission) owns about 80% of Areva. The company globally operates in 43 countries and employs 48,000 staff.

Areva designs and builds nuclear reactors and components for nuclear power plants, and it also supplies nuclear fuel, engineering, maintenance, and inspection of nuclear facilities.