In Ljubljana, the kick off meeting of all project partners from Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro took place in January 2012.
13 representatives of the 10 project partner organisations met at the first project meeting, where they presented their organisations, activities and situations in their countries, and discussed European social dialogue in the retail, food-processing and agriculture sector with view to modernising the labour market in their countries.
The project manager Tatjana Pajnkihar gave a short introduction to the project, describing the background of the project, its aims and activities.
Representatives of each participating country presented the situation in the labour market and in social dialogue in their country, especially the characteristics of the agriculture and food processing as well as commerce sector, the changes in recent years and the current problems.
ZDS, TZS, ZZS and the Slovenian TU partners (KŽI and SDTS) provided their know-how and best practice examples on European social dialogue (KŽI, TZS and ZZS presented their activity within their European Social partner organisations EFFAT, EuroCommerce and COGECA). A representative of EuroCommerce presented experience in European sectoral social dialogue in commerce. ZDS presented its experiences on its EU accession and the implementation of the aquis communautaire in the area of social dialogue. Partners from FYR Macedonia and Montenegro (UPCG, ORM, SRTM, Agrosindikat) presented the situation in their countries and the project team discussed the problems.
As a consequence of the economic crisis, similar problems on the labour market are noticed (also in concerning sectors): less activity/production, increase of unemployment, lower wages, etc. The state of play also presents a challenge for the social partners as well as the social models in the countries, especially FR Macedonia and Montenegro, who are candidate countries for European Union, and are yet strengthening social partnership especially on the branch level.
The partners agreed on the Work programme discussed about the possible structure of the publicationset, graphic design and the course of future activities in the project.
The project SSD-SMM is co-funded by the European Commission.