The European Commission has published the main messages from the Tripartite Social Summit held on October 14, the twice yearly meeting that brings the EU institutions together with European level unions and employer organisations.
The summit reaffirmed the bloc’s social agenda, including the adequate minimum wages framework that member states are still transposing unevenly and the skills agenda the Commission ties to its competitiveness programme. Social summits produce no legislation, but they are the venue where the Commission takes the temperature of the social partners before bringing labour files forward, and this one’s language keeps those files alive.
The meeting sat between two harder edged events on this week’s calendar: the European Council in Brussels, where competitiveness and the budget dominate, and the continuing argument over how much of the bloc’s industrial strategy should be social policy by another name.