Various parliamentarians were present, including Mr Thijs Berman, EP rapporteur on DCI.
The Confederal Secretary of the ETUC, Judith Kirton-Darling, presented the key trade union messages concerning DCI, focusing on 5 main points:
Decent work should be mainstreamed in the EU development policy, in accordance to recent EU policy recommendations, such the EU Agenda for Change;
Promotion of the role and capacity of social partners in development (one of the fundamental pillar of Decent Work is indeed social dialogue);
Support to an ‘actor based approach’ in development cooperation, highlighting specifically organisations that are membership based and therefore more capable to grant long-term sustainability to development processes;
Strengthen the thematic programmes of the DCI, being the main mechanism to support independence of trade unions in partner countries;
Give relevance to specific indexes, such as the UN Human Development Index, when it comes to differentiation between middle and low-income countries (MICs and LICs).
Parliamentarians expressed their willingness for considering these inputs, including Csaba Ory (EPP), speaking on behalf of Mr Gay Mitchell (the shadow rapporteur on DCI [1] ) who was unfortunately not able to attend to the meeting.
Particularly interesting points were raised by Mr Berman (S&D), who showed openness to receive possible concrete suggestions for text improvement, although underlining that decent work is already taken on board in the DCI. On the differentiation principle, he put attention on the fact that there is currently another instrument (the so called ‘partnership instrument’) where MICs can be also eligible to receive EU support. He also recognised that addressing social inequality constitutes nowadays the main challenge for development cooperation, supporting social and economic rights, according to Amartya Sen’s conception of development as ‘gradual extension of people’s real freedoms’. In this sense, Berman finally empathised with the concept of ‘representation’ characterising social partners as an important element when mapping actors within civil society.
The first version of the rapporteur’s report is foreseen to be ready by the beginning of July. In the meantime, TUDCN will put forward specific amendments proposals to the different political forces of the EP.
By Paola Simonetti, ITUC/TUDCN
* Trade Union Intergroup is a space where the different political forces of the EP regularly meet the European trade unions to debate the most urgent labour related dossiers. For the first time the ITUC took part in this, given the topic addressed.
