PERC Women’s Committee The founding conference of the PERC Women’s Committee, representing 89 trade unions from 43 countries and organizing over thirty million trade union women took place on 30 and 31 October 2008 in Turin. The conference formally established the Women's structure of the PERC. The Conference elected the twelve members of the Women committee.

The Conference has discussed and adopted the statutes of the newly created structure and had a first discussion on the plan of action for the 2009/2010.

2012 The PERC Women’s Committee is fully structured, has its own program and work plan which is submitted for approval to the PERC Executive Committee The work program has the following areas of priority:  Decent Work Decent Life for Women aiming to achieve social justice and gender equality  Increase union activity for pay equity; fight against gender pay gap  Coherence in trade union gender policies; gender audits to strengthen national policies  Strengthen women’s involvement in trade union decision-making; participation of young women  Engage in effort to enable the adoption of the ILO Convention for domestic workers  Condemn violation of women’ trade union rights and violence against women

Some activities…. a)General: PERC Executive Committee; ITUC Women’s Committee meeting; PERC General Assembly; ILO Conference b)Campaigns and projects Decent Work and Decent Life Campaign for women Decisions for Life campaign Promotion of women in decision making positions c)Education and training strengthen national trade union women’s committees Develop expertise and analytical skills to develop strategies, action plans Strengthen women’s presence in collective bargaining and social dialogue

Developing project making skills ( CEE and CIS) It is a reality that the PERC affiliated organisations in the region lack the knowledge and skills to develop European projects that would help the empowering of the women’s and youth structures in the organisations. At the same the EC has an increasing decentralized policy as concerns the call for proposals; the local EC representations have an increased role in supporting the project applications.

Sub regional meeting Balkans Sub-regional meeting of representatives in the Balkan countries. Around 30 participants from Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Romania took part in the meeting. The meeting had as its purpose to strengthen the women’s structures in the region along the policy lines proposed by the region: the EU integration process, the decent work decent life agenda, fight against precarious work, organizing and gender policy making in the unions.

Sub regional meeting for CIS The participants in the sub regional meeting expressed their interest in enlarging the gender audits experience to all countries in the CIS ( for the time being gender audits have been organized only in Russian, Ukraine and Kazakhstan); they requested to have the support of the ILO in getting the knowledge on ILO methodology of gender audits.

Women’s School “Empowering of TU Women as a Tool to Implement Decent Work Agenda” PERC Women’s School was organized in Vilnius from 26 to 28 October Around 50 trade union women from 24 countries in the PERC region were present in Vilnius.

Supporting the domestic workers campaign 12 by 12

PERC WOMEN’S SCHOOL AND CONFERENCE WILL TAKE PLACE IN BUDAPEST 6-8 NOVEMBER PERC WOMEN’S CONFERENCE will adopt the work program and action plan for the next four years ELECTIONS OF THE 12 MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE

More information? The PERC web site : The PERC Newsletter