Special attention was put on the situation with workers rights in Romania, where, first, social dialog system was reformed and eventually dismantled by the government pressured by the international institutions (IMF, WB and ECB) that led to significant decline of the collective bargaining coverage, and, secondly, the social security fiscal basis was changed that transferred almost entirely all the social contributions from employer’ to employee’s responsibility.

ITUC frontline and priorities as well as agenda for the 2018 was presented. The participants also discussed the ITUC human, trade union rights survey, and its annual index of workers’ rights, which ranged all the analysed countries in the categories from 1 (no violations) to 5 (no guarantees of rights). Five European countries were ranked in the worst category: Belarus, Greece, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine.