Social dialogue at the centre: EGRUiEN holds its first Strategic Board Meeting
On 11 June 2026, the EGRUiEN Horizon Europe project held its first Strategic Board Meeting online, bringing together project representatives and members of the Strategic Board for a focused discussion on how social dialogue can help shape a fair green and digital transition. The meeting and marked an important step in strengthening the project’s dialogue with stakeholders at European and national levels.
The Strategic Board has a clear role in the project: it brings together a selected group of experts and stakeholders to provide high-level guidance and to help ensure the policy relevance, practical applicability, impact and dissemination of EGRUiEN’s results. In this sense, the Board is not an add-on to the project, but a key mechanism for keeping the research closely connected to the needs, experiences and strategic concerns of those involved in labour market change and social dialogue today.
EGRUiEN explores how Europe’s green and digital transitions are reshaping work, production and labour market institutions, and asks what kinds of social dialogue are needed to make these changes socially just. The project focuses on four sectors undergoing particularly intense change — automotive, energy, care, and on-demand transport — and studies how employers, trade unions, public institutions and other actors negotiate technological change, decarbonisation and new forms of non-standard work. Running from January 2025 to December 2028, the project seeks to identify coordination mechanisms and institutional solutions that can support both competitiveness and inclusion.
Today’s meeting was structured to introduce Strategic Board members to the project and to open space for exchange around the core research agenda. The programme included a project introduction, a round of introductions, a first set of breakout sessions on the research plan, a second set of breakout discussions on disruptive change and social dialogue, and a concluding session on next steps. The breakout format was designed to combine short work-package presentations with discussion among participants.
In the first breakout round, participants were introduced to the research focus of WP3 and WP4 on the automotive and energy sectors, and WP5 and WP6 on on-demand transport and care. These sessions were organized around the key questions guiding each work package: the research question, the country-level case focus, the types of respondents to be involved, and the next research steps. This structure was intended to familiarise Strategic Board members with the logic of the project’s sectoral research and to create a shared basis for later discussion.
The second breakout round moved from project design to the broader challenges faced by social partners in practice. The discussion prompts addressed three areas in particular: the biggest challenges linked to the green and digital transition in each sector, the role of social dialogue in responding to those challenges, and how vulnerable groups can be meaningfully involved in these processes. These prompts illustrate why the Strategic Board is so relevant for EGRUiEN: the project does not only study transformation from a distance, but seeks to build a research-based dialogue with actors who confront these transitions directly in their sectors and countries.
The meeting also situated today’s exchange within the broader architecture of the project. The EGRUiEN research plan moves from historical case studies of negotiated transition in nine European countries (WP2), through current sectoral studies (WP3–WP6), and toward action research and cross-national analysis aimed at building better bargaining institutions and strategies (WP7–WP8). This staged design makes the Strategic Board especially important: it helps connect historical learning, ongoing empirical research, and future-oriented policy development.
An important forward-looking element presented during the meeting was the plan for Mutual Learning Labs (MLL). These labs are intended to introduce preliminary research results, discuss their relevance for policymaking, and reflect on the role of social dialogue in addressing the green and digital transition. The timeline presented today foresees a Strategic Board meeting in November 2026 dedicated to planning MLL1 for the automotive and energy sectors, followed by MLL1 in January 2027. A second lab for the care and on-demand transport sectors is planned for January 2028, followed by an in-person meeting in Bratislava in June 2028 and the final project conference in Wrocław in October 2028.
Today’s first Strategic Board Meeting therefore marked more than an introductory milestone. It opened a structured exchange between research and practice at a moment when the future of work in Europe is being redefined by decarbonisation, digitalisation and new forms of employment. By engaging social partners and other stakeholders early in the process, EGRUiEN strengthens its capacity to generate findings that are not only academically robust, but also relevant for policymaking, collective bargaining and inclusive labour market governance across Europe.