Continuous vocational training (CVT) has become a major feature of the EU social agenda. It is expected to foster many political objectives such as: higher employment levels, competitiveness, social inclusion. The “neo liberal” nature of the European Employment Strategy (and the European Social Fund serving as a financial tool) seems to be quite consensual in the scholarship. Since national governments can no more use keynesian-alike tools, they tend to concentrate their efforts towards the labour market, through supply side strategies. Unemployment has become an individual responsibility. Workers are expected to accumulate skills in order to gain value and be recruited by capitalists. In most EU countries, this process has been aggravated by the progressive destruction of collective agreements, and growing decentralization of industrial relations and bargaining Yet, some issues are still unclear, thus ongoing debates remain vivid and require further investigations, for instance: under which conditions are industrial relations being specifically affected by the European integration process, instead of domestic dynamics, and how does it impacts the trends in commodification of labour? The argument sketched in this paper is that EU member States remain very resilient to strategic changes developed in EU programs: therefore, there is a large variety of paths followed by the commodification dynamic. The data used for the paper has been collected during a PhD thesis, assessing the impact of the EES on industrial relations in the field of CVT, with a French-Italian comparison. It comprises document analysis, semi-structured interviews and the analysis of training actions made by French OPCA and Italian FPI (industrial relations institutions receiving employers’ contributions for workers training) and subsidized by the ESF. With respect to theories of European integration, the paper articulates the approaches of “usages of Europe” (Jacquot, Woll, Palier, Graziano 2013,2014) and of “resistances to Europe” (Saurugger, Terpan, 2013).
