EU: an interview with Luca Visentini, the new General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC)

• How would you sum up the political direction underpinning the work program adopted by the Congress?

Luca Visentini. The first priority for us is boosting economic growth and coming out from the crisis because if we don’t, we cannot create jobs, tackle unemployment, defend the European social model, restore any kind of social protection, or restore any kind of social rights. So, growth first of all. To achieve this we need concrete proposals and for that our work program mentions two pillars: investment and internal demand. About investment, we have to relaunch our investment plan proposal: ‘A new path for Europe’*. At the same time, we need to negotiate the European Commission’s investment plan, the Juncker plan, because this is our current reality. The proposal is not enough for us. We have an issue about the amount of money really available for public investment, and another one concerning the rules and objectives of the plan. It is not clear at all if there will be some guidelines for the projects proposed by the different Member states to ensure that the money will not continue to go only to the strongest countries and to the multinational companies,…