By Nicoletta Merlo 

Traineeships represent a pathway for young people to get familiar with the world of work, for guidance and training purposes. They have developed considerably throughout Europe, including thanks to the European Youth Guarantee programme. The Council Recommendation on a Quality Framework for Traineeships from 2014 provided valuable guidelines to Member States for implementing the instrument. 

Unfortunately, over time there have been abuses and distortions in the way traineeships are conducted, with a rise in cases of exploitation of young trainees who were used to replace workers as cheap labour with no access to adequate safeguards and social protection. 

For this reason, the EESC endorses the European Commission's aim to improve the quality framework for traineeships across Europe, especially with regard to strengthening the learning and training content and to combat the abuse and misuse of traineeships. 

However, the two Commission proposals — which include an updated Council Recommendation and a Directive — only address some of the issues and have some problematic aspects: 

• they refer indiscriminately to all forms of traineeships, failing to adequately take into account the existing differences between the various types of traineeship and their purposes or their different applications in Member States; 
• the necessary measures to prevent the misuse of traineeships upstream are not foreseen, just as there is a lack of binding rules to raise quality standards; and 
• as far as the proposal for a directive is concerned, the restricted scope of application to only those trainees who are considered to be workers or who are in an employment relationship — which is the case in less than half of the Member States — limits the range of beneficiaries and risks not achieving the expected results. 

From my point of view, in order to improve the quality of traineeships, first of all the minimum quality criteria should be set for each type of traineeship, limiting their use upstream. These criteria should provide basic safeguards and a strong focus on training as well as commitments to counter all cases of misuse with appropriate measures, including by strengthening the inspection system. 

Moreover, in order to make the traineeship experience accessible to all, although we cannot generically speak of wages since trainees in most cases are not considered workers and the traineeship is mostly considered to be outside the employment context, it would be important to put an end to unpaid traineeships through a compulsory allowance that is not only parameterised on the basis of the tasks and responsibilities that the traineeship entails, but also takes into account any expenses that trainees have to incur to carry out this experience. 

Finally, more consideration should be given to the role that the social partners can play in the implementation of the regulation at the national level as well as in the monitoring and control of the use of the instrument.