The BARMETAL team organized a midterm project workshop for project partners and associated partners. Research progress and preliminary findings have been presented on behalf of 12 studied countries (Italy, France, Romania, Serbia, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands. Preliminary comparative conclusions point at the relevance of digitalization, automation and decarbonization processes across all studied countries, but varying responses in terms of the capacity of collective bargaining to address the impact of these processes.

In this regard, IR actors in studied countries are mainly tackling the impacts of production and job changes driven by D-A-D through collective bargaining are looking for ways to embed the changes in work processes and working conditions.

Despite diversity in the contextual and industrial landscape of studied countries collective bargaining at different levels is finding individualized ways to anticipate and manage the effects of D-A-D on employees mainly through arrangements related to training, working time, work organisation, work–life balance, management of redundancies, or safety and health at work.