On 16 February 2026, the European Labour Authority (ELA) launched a communication campaign promoting a key message that resonates strongly with the ILO's mandate: declared work benefits all. For workers, it ensures access to labour rights, social protection and safer working conditions. For employers, it supports fair competition, legal certainty and sustainable business development. For societies, it strengthens public revenues and contributes to more resilient social protection systems.
Strengthened ILO-ELA cooperation on informality
This initiative comes in the context of strengthened cooperation between the ILO and ELA on addressing informality and promoting transition to formality.
In December 2025, the ILO and ELA jointly organised a workshop at the International Training Centre of the ILO in Turin, focusing on the measurement of informality and undeclared work for effective policy making. The event brought together experts from EU Member States and other regions to exchange practices, discuss methodological challenges and explore how improved data can support more effective policies. The workshop built on the new statistical Resolution concerning statistics on the informal economy adopted at the 21st International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in 2023. This new framework broadens the scope of previous statistical standards. It provides, for the first time, a statistical definition of the overarching concept of informal economy and expands the overlap with the issue of undeclared work.
The promotion of declared work, good practices and innovative approaches developed by ELA contributes to the broader objective of facilitating transition from the informal to the formal economy, as set out in the ILO's Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation, 2015 (No. 204). This message will be reinforced by Frédéric Lapeyre, Director of the ILO Priority Action Programme on Transition to Formality at the plenary session of the 20th meeting of the European Platform on tackling undeclared work on Bridging policy and practice to propose solutions for tackling undeclared work on 12 March 2026, Larnaca, Cyprus.
ELA's campaign is an important effort to raising awareness about the value of formalization and declared work in Europe.
Watch the campaign videos here in all European languages:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvoQC3mmwYSXu0sYviDQpiFWQEKvaxkGd
