Europe

Veolia will lose its water contract for Nice after Mayor Christian Estrosi said he wants the French city to control its water management from February 2015. This is one of Veolia’s Heritage Contracts. It’s the oldest private water contract in the world, awarded without competition and never once subjected to competition in 150 years.

Over 100,000 people joined street rallies organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in cities across Ireland on 9th February to voice their anger at the huge cost of the Irish bank bailout. Protesters carried German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and Finnish-language banners asking: “Is this fair? Five million Irish paying 42% of Europe’s bank debt.”

PSI congratulates Carola Fyschbach-Pyttel, General Secretary of the EPSU, PSI's European branch, on her recent nomination by the ETUC Women’s Committee as woman of the month of May for a 2013 Calendar published by the European Institute for Gender Equality.

Six two-day seminars for 30 young rank and file trade unionists were organised between 2009 and 2011 as part of the PSI /IMPACT –sponsored project “Motivating young workers membership”. Originally intended as a bilateral project between IMPACT and the Czech Health Service and Social Care trade union (OS ZSP), the success of the first few seminars led the project organisers to also reach out to Slovakian and other Czech affiliates.

‘Water is a Human Right’ has made history as being the first European Citizens' Initiative in the history of the European Union to have collected over 1 million signatures.