Luca Visentini, a poet as European trade union head
Luca Visentini, ETUC
(ROME) - Luca Visentini, tipped to be the new secretary general of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), is a union doyen, and occasional poet, who hopes to boost job creation in the wake of the economic crisis.
"There are those who read to relax in the evening, he writes poems", said his friend Cinzia Del Rio, head of external relations at UIL, one of three major Italian trade union confederations and where Visentini spent much of his career.
Born in 1969 in Udine, in north-eastern Italy, Luca Visentini joined the Italian Labour Union (UIL) in 1989, aged 20.
After a lengthy union career, he says he is ready to tackle the ills created by the financial crisis and is keen to win wage increases through collective bargaining, contributing to economic growth by strengthening domestic demand.
"Priority number one, the most urgent, will be the fight against the economic crisis, boosting growth and creating new jobs," Visentini told AFP, adding that he thought the European Commission's investment plan was "insufficient".
One of Visentini's biggest bugbears is the fact that EU money has been used to bail out banks, rather than be poured into the investment in the European industrial sector that unions have been pushing for.
He also hopes to be able to make a difference in the current migrant crisis sweeping Europe, by "exerting pressure on national governments to assume their responsibilities, prepare host plans of integration and concrete assistance".
Visentini started off in charge of the youth sector at UIL. From there he scaled the union ladder rungs, developing a particular interest in cooperation with foreign unions.
- Support for immigrant workers -
For 14 years, from 1997 to 2011, he was in charge of the Interregional Trade Union Councils (CSIR) -- cross-border institutions -- and was CSIR head of Udine, Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Veneto region and Croatia.
"He did a lot of work with immigrant workers, both from a union and human point of view, seeking to provide legal assistance where necessary," Del Rio told AFP.
Visentini joined the ETUC in 1997 as a member of the CSIR coordination committee and divided his career between the Italian and the European union confederation, acting as vice president of the CSIR committee between 2007 to 2011 and serving as a member of the Economic and Employment Committee of the ETUC.
In 2011 he was elected ETUC conferderal secretary with a range of responsibilities including collective bargaining and wage policy, migration and mobility, education and training or the EU budget and structural funds.
Visentini lives with his Spanish partner in Trieste, in the northeast of Italy, and takes the bus to Brussels.
"I do not know if it is because of his Spanish partner, but he has a Mediterranean character, open, spontaneous, he does not seem like he's from the north," Del Rio quipped.