On 16th and 17th November 2023, the EUD Policy Manager and EUD Policy Officer, respectively Mr Alexandre Bloxs and Ms Charlotte Olhausen, attended the European Employment and Social Rights Forum in Brussels. The theme of this year’s forum covered the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the European Labour Market.
Given the recent technological developments bringing a new revolution on how we are approaching employment, it is crucial that the people active in the labour market are upgrading their skills to use the latest technical developments. Additionally, it is essential that there is further research into the potential impacts of AI on persons with disabilities’ access to the labour market. AI has the potential to discriminate and add an additional layer of bias. Therefore, robust EU anti-discrimination legislation is required to combat any discriminatory effects on deaf people. What’s more, to avoid the replacement of a part of the workforce, where there already exist labour shortages, by these emerging technologies, there is an impediment for upskilling and life-long learning.
However, as highlighted in our recent policy recommendations on establishing targets to increase the employment rate of deaf people in the EU, deaf people are left behind in accessing the labour market within the European Union. This is reinforced by the absence of any official data on the number of deaf people that are part of the European workforce. Consequently, deaf people are overlooked in social policies fostering employment and social rights.
Yet, deaf people are no different than their hearing counterparts: they must also learn new skills to use and become familiar with the latest technological developments. In fact, deaf people are further marginalized in accessing the labour market and accessing vocational training to increase their skills due to the lack of recognition of their national sign languages as full languages. Only through our national sign languages we will be able to access open, fair and inclusive labour markets.
Therefore, during the EU Employment and Social Rights, EUD called the European Union, especially the European Commission, to ensure that any policies fostering the access to the labour market, including through learning new skills, must be accessible to all deaf people through our national sign languages. Moreover, EUD also called for the unblocking of the EU Anti-Discrimination Directive (which has been blocked since 2008) as this will be pivotal in ensuring AI does not become a further discriminatory barrier to deaf people when accessing the labour market.
Only then, can deaf people be active economic contributors to the labour market and the EU can finally achieve its goal of becoming a Union of Equality.
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