PERC Youth Committee meeting

The PERC Youth Committee met on 18 and 19 December in Brussels. It discussed issues of Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnerships, youth representation and organising, migration and mobility jointly with the ETUC Youth committee, outcomes of the ITUC Organising Academy for youth.

The ETUC special adviser Tom Jenkins introduced the TTIP processes and related challenges and the trade union response to them. The main concerns are :
• unification of regulations and the danger of bringing down EU standards (e.g. on chemicals),
• decent jobs creation impact – will TTIP bring more decent jobs or contrary?
• investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, when an investor can sue a government regarding profit losses, while local companies can not.

There is also a question of lack on transparency about the possible deal that would affect hundreds millions of people.

The ETUI researcher Kurt Vandaele presented results of the European survey about youth membership and trade union motivation and its correlation with youth policies and structures in unions (enclosed). In particular, the research showed that unions with a strong youth committee, youth department or network have less “age deficit” than unions lacking solid youth structure. Union revitalisation is at stake: young workers are in need of unions and young workers being crucial for union revitalisation.

The PERC Youth committee members joint the ETUC Youth Committee session on mobility and migration delivered by ETUC Confederal Secretary Luca Vicentini. He outlined the main ETUC priorities.

Mobility: real concerns as there are some countries that put obstacles to EU rules. The unions consider necessary to remove existing obstacles and discrimination - job offers should be fair and working conditions should equal and in line with legislation and collective agreements.

Migration: there is a need to fight against discrimination and for equal treatment. Asylum and tragedies in Mediterranean sea: There should be assistance and search in sea – national states should put that in place.

Goda Neverauskayte informed about the structure and priority actions of the 3rd PERC Youth Committee. The main priorities are migration and orgnanising. There was a conference on migration run in Baku in September and in 2015 the main PERC conference will focus on organizing young workers.

The PERC Youth committee invited to take part in symbolic action on migrants day. The photoset is available at ITUC Flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ituc/sets/72157649821804012/ .

The Committee also discussed the report about activities, made planning for 2015 and debated trade union motivational survey.

The next meeting will take place in May 2015.