London
14 July 2006
Meeting in London today for their second biannual bilateral summit, the General Secretaries of the CGIL and TUC, Guglielmo Epifani and Brendan Barber discussed a number of issues, including:
Both General Secretaries expressed serious concern about the deteriorating and dangerous security and humanitarian situation in the Middle East, and agreed that in the long-term, the EuroMed initiative, which brings the EU, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean countries together, could make a useful contribution to peace and justice in the Middle East. They stressed their joint commitment to relaunching the trade union EuroMed forum which brings unions in the region together.
Membership of both the CGIL and TUC is currently growing, with new membership opportunities especially among migrant workers, but both confederations agreed that more needs to be done about organising workers, and closer links at European, sectoral and enterprise level are needed - especially in global businesses.
On Europe, the confederations discussed the forthcoming ETUC Congress in May 2007, and they agreed that the ETUC needed to take a stronger role on organising and representing Europe's workers. The European Social Model must be the strengthened, and the ETUC needs to help unions to make the model more concrete and meaningful at the company-level.
Finally, ahead of the G8 summit in St Petersburg, the two General Secretaries made a personal appeal to world leaders to keep their promises on global poverty and to ensure that world trade should have a social dimension rather than make victims out of individual workers affected by restructuring.
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