The 9th meeting of the PERC Executive Committee

The ninth meeting of the PERC Executive Committee took place in Brussels on 10 March. More than a hundred unionists from different European countries discussed the PERC activity reports, including report of the PERC Youth and Women’s committees, approved the activity programme for 2015. The meeting was chaired by the PERC President Mikhail Shmakov.

Sharan Burrow, ITUC General Secretary, informed the Committee about ITUC frontline priorities: global supply chains, minimum living wages and formalizing informal work, eliminating slavery and forced labour, climate justice and industrial transformation, and ITUC Organising academies activities. Campaign against forced labour and modern slavery in Qatar remains the top priority. She also reported about the achieved compromise with International Employers Organisation about the right to strike that allows returning to pre-2012 processes within the ILO Supervisory bodies.

The PERC approach to the Eastern Partnership processes and challenges was debated by the Committee. Since the start of the Civil Society Forum the social partners jointly with the EESC have been underlying structural and functional faults of the CSF and relevant EU institutions in an effort to draw attention to disincentives to participation or eventual marginalisation or elimination of the social partners from the CSF. These functional faults might have further repercussions on the level of the bilateral civil society platforms to be institutionalised under Association and DCFTA agreements and the social partners have to mobilise to avoid that.

PERC General Secretary Bernadette Segol introduced preparation process for the third PERC General Assembly that would take place in December this year. It was proposed to establish a working group that would develop a draft PERC policy programme, and would incorporate proposals from the Women’s Committee to amend the PERC Constitution. The working group will submit its proposed draft to the PERC Summer School that would take place in October, after the ETUC Congress.

The Committee also expressed solidarity with families of miners killed in explosion at Zasyadko mine.