European Trade Union Committee for Education

On 20-22 April 2015, the Latvian Presidency of the EU Council organised an informal meeting of the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council (EPSCO) in Riga. At the meeting, the Ministers discussed the role and the future development of social dialogue in two plenary sessions. They also debated in two parallel workshops the challenges posed on social dialogue as well as wage-setting issues in the context of social dialogue. Social dialogue reinforcement with the aim to enable social partners to address socio-economic issues in Europe more effectively has been from the outset a declared key task of the new Juncker-Commission. The topic is also a work priority of the Latvian Presidency and consequently is placed at the top of its political agenda.

In his speech at the opening plenary meeting,  Vice-President of the European Commission for the Euro and Social Dialogue, Valdis Dombrovskis linked the meeting to the recent high-level event on "A new start for social dialogue" which was held in Brussels on 5 March 2015. He emphasized that it was now the time to work on the implementation of the decisions taken then and he assured that this was indeed the European Commission's goal.  According to a media release of the Latvian Presidency, the importance of social dialogue with regard to the European Semester both at national and EU level was highlighted as well. Apparently, the meeting also focused on possible concrete initiatives for social dialogue capacity building.

"As one of the two European sectoral social partners in education, we are  of course very much in support of every useful initiative aiming on the reinforcement of social dialogue both at European and national level.", says ETUCE European Director Martin Rømer, "However, representing 11 million teachers across Europe from all levels of the education sector it would be obviously important for ETUCE to hear, that the Commission intends to strengthen the sectoral social dialogue, too. It would now be appropriate for the Commission to make it very clear that they recognise the important role of the sectoral social partners in the process of sectoral policy shaping."

See also the press conference following the informal meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzdKVheyPN0&index=5&list=PLodeDt40MJHL3_P43au6Z6YFxLwuBMO0Z