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as the organisation's general secretary for the next four years. Also elected to the new team that will lead the ETUC until 2015 were Józef Niemiec (Poland) and Patrick Itschert (Belgium) as deputy general secretaries; and Claudia Menne (Germany), Luca Visentini (Italy), Veronica Anna-Maria Nilsson (Sweden), Judith Kirton-Darling (United Kingdom) as confederal secretaries. Ignacio Fernández Toxo (Spain) was elected ETUC president.



The new General Secretary presented to the Congress the Athens Manifesto, which will be the road map of the organisation. With the approval of the Athens manifesto the ETUC asserts that wages are not the enemy of the economy but its motor and that the autonomy of social partners in collective bargaining must be respected, denouncing the danger of the “Euro Plus pact”.

The ETUC will fight for a European New Deal for workers against austerity governance and for a European economic governance that serves the interests of the European people and not the markets, for a coordinated plan against youth unemployment and to prioritise the improvement of working conditions of all European workers.

The ETUC commits to demand effective and stringent regulation of financial markets and ratings agencies and to campaign and claim that fundamental social rights take precedence over economic freedoms and consequently enshrine this principle in a Social Progress Protocol in European treaties, in a revised Posted Workers Directive and in internal market regulation known as “Monti II”. An action day has been approved to promote the Manifesto’s aims.

Athens Manifesto.EN.pdf



Furthermore, during the first day of the congress, trade union delegates from 36 countries sent a clear message with an emergency resolution and a letter to the ministers of Finance urging them change the logic of the financial bailouts, to respect the autonomy of social partners and to remind them that Europe has no competence on pay.

On the eve of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council, the Congress of the European Trade Union Confederation adopted an emergency resolution with a special procedure. Expressing full solidarity and support with the workers and the trade union movement in Greece and other countries that are severely tested by the different austerity measures, Congress said that they will never accept direct or indirect interventions in pay, in the autonomy of collective bargaining or in national wage formation systems.

2011-05-16_Draft_Emergency_Resolution_Greece_ECOFIN-doc_1_.pdf letterministers.pdf