Who Plans the Transition? FES and ETUC Bring Balkan Trade Unions Together in Sarajevo and Kakanj

The seminar took place in Sarajevo and included a visit to the mining town of Kakanj. Participants from trade unions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia were joined by colleagues from the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), CEE Bankwatch Network, RESET and the consultancy Syndex.

The question behind the seminar was simple: when coal mines and power plants close, who decides what comes next? For the Western Balkans, this is not an abstract question. The region still depends heavily on lignite and aging infrastructure, and access to the EU market increasingly depends on carbon performance. Yet as candidate countries, the Western Balkans have no access to the EU's Just Transition Fund.

Sarajevo: setting the scene

The seminar opened on Monday evening, when Damir Miljević, energy economist at RESET, presented the state of the energy transition in the region. In conversation with ETUC Confederal Secretary Ludovic Voet, his contribution set the tone for three days of open exchange between unions that face similar pressures but rarely sit at the same table.

Kakanj: the transition on the ground

On Tuesday, the group traveled to Kakanj, one of Bosnia and Herzegovina's main coal regions. After a welcome note by Mayor Mirnes Bajtarević, a panel moderated by Mariam Matiashvili of the FES Competence Center Climate and Social Justice brought together Ben Lennon of ETUC, Pippa Gallop of CEE Bankwatch Network and Sonja Stamenkova, Mayor of Makedonska Kamenica, whose municipality is already planning its own local transition.

ETUC's contribution drew on lessons from the North Sea. In a 2020 survey of 1,383 offshore oil and gas workers in the UK, 91% had never heard the term "just transition", yet 82% said they would consider a job in another industry. The workers were ready for a change, but nobody helped them make it: they paid for their own retraining and were offered new jobs with lower pay and worse conditions. Training alone, the message went, is not a plan. Workers need to know where the new job is, what it pays, whether they can reach it from home and whether it will still exist after the training ends.

Union representatives from the region then spoke about what mine closures mean for workers in practice. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, around 14,000 people work directly in mining and quarrying, most of them in public companies that offer secure jobs, good wages and benefits. Comparable jobs are hard to find, especially for older and lower-skilled workers, and thousands more in supplier companies depend on the mines and power plants. A closure affects not only miners but also their families, local businesses, public services, and the town itself.

Fabien Couderc of Syndex then presented the organization's report on the just transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. The group also visited the SteelCityZen entrepreneurship hub. SteelCityZen is a project funded by the EU's Danube Region Program, in which the Municipality of Kakanj works with ten partners from nine countries, including industrial cities such as Nikšić, Ostrava and Stara Zagora, to diversify local labor markets and better match local skills with new jobs.

Lessons from Germany

Back in Sarajevo, Sonja Hennen of the DGB presented Germany's coal phase-out. The German Coal Commission brought unions, industry, affected regions, and civil society into one process, backed by up to €40 billion in structural aid and collective agreements that ruled out redundancies and supported older workers until retirement. Seven years on, the results are mixed: the new jobs are smaller in scale and less often covered by collective agreements, and public support for the energy transition has dropped from 69% to 60% in five years.

Looking beyond

The final session on Wednesday looked ahead. Couderc summarised what the workshops had produced: decarbonization is not credible without reindustrialization, social acceptance is the weakest link, and "copy-paste" reskilling programs that move heavy industry workers into services ignore labor market realities, particularly for older workers. Where sectoral social dialogue exists, workers are better prepared; where it does not, they have little influence.

Ben Lennon turned to the political dimension. ETUC's proposal is worker-led regional industrial plans that ask not only how to close what exists, but which industries can grow in a region, what its factories could produce, what skills its workers already have, and who ensures the new jobs are quality jobs covered by collective agreements. Miljević closed the program with the EU's Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, worth €6 billion for 2024 to 2027, of which €2 billion is in grants, and the reform agendas that tie its payments to measures including the decarbonization of energy markets.

The message was consistent across countries. The transition will come, whether through climate policy, markets or company decisions, and workers who plan for it early have a far better chance of shaping it. FES will continue to work with trade unions across the region to keep the social dimension at the center of the Western Balkans' green transition.