Andrea Arcais was born in Sardinia in 1960 and emigrated to Germany with his parents and brothers in 1965. After training as a bookseller and attaining his abitur through evening classes he took German studies and art education in Münster. Arcais’ particular areas of interest include Europe, climate and energy policy. He is executive director of the discourse network KlimaDiskurs.NRW – which he played a key role in setting up – bringing together companies, trade unions and civil society organisations.
More recently he became head of department at DGB North Rhine Westphalia with responsibility for energy and climate policy, as well as personal assistant to the chair. Since May 2022 Andrea Arcais has been executive director of the IGBCE’s Arbeit und Umwelt foundation.
Arcais has been a trade union member since 1979 and a member of IGBCE for 20 years.
Michael Vassiliadis was born in 1964. After graduating from secondary school (Realschule), he trained as a chemical lab technician at Bayer AG in Dormagen. In 1986 he commenced full-time trade union activities as secretary of IG Chemie-Papier-Keramik (since 1997 IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie [IGBCE], the Mining, Chemical and Energy Industrial Union) in various roles. In March 2004 he was elected member of the executive committee. In October 2009 he was elected chairman for the first time at the fourth ordinary IGBCE congress and in October 2021 he was re-elected for the third time at the seventh congress.
Since May 2012 Michael Vassiliadis has also served as President of IndustriALL Europe, representing European industrial trade unions.
Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Dr Bärbel Kofler (SPD) is Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development. Before her appointment to this role in December 2016, she was Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Aid for five years. She has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2004, where her previous roles include Development Policy Spokesperson of the SPD parliamentary group and member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Dr Kofler has a doctorate in linguistics.
After studying German literature, journalism and communication sciences, Gerald Breyer initially worked as an editor of the employee magazine of RAG AG, Germany’s largest coalmining corporation. After joining Evonik Industries AG, he initiated the Group's corporate responsibility and sustainability activities. His main focus was social and ethical issues. For many years he has been active in the Peer Learning Group Human Rights of the UN Global Compact Network Germany and in Econsense's Human Rights and Value Creation cluster. In addition, he has been an active member of IGBCE since the start of his career. In mid-2022, he was appointed Evonik’s first Group Human Rights Officer.
Born in France in 1967, Isabelle Schömann was elected Confederal Secretary of the ETUC at its 14th Congress in Vienna in May 2019. She heads ETUC policy on workers’ participation and EWCs, industrial policy and company law, competition and labour law, internal market and legislation, digitalisation, standardisation, public services and corporate social responsibility. Previously, she was a principal adviser to the European Commission’s Regulatory Scrutiny Board (2016–19). From 2002 to 2016, she was a senior researcher with the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) in Brussels, covering European social dialogue and European and comparative labour law, corporate governance and workers’ participation, fundamental social rights, and impacts of the 2008 crisis on workers' rights. In 2014–16 she worked on the impact of the Commission’s Regulatory and Fitness Performance Programme (REFIT) on labour rights. Isabelle was legal advisor to the European Economic and Social Committee Workers’ Group on the European Pillar of Social Rights (2016). She was also an ETUI legal adviser and member of the ETUC negotiation delegations on harassment and violence at work, stress at work and telework. She was a member of the ETUI staff representation and ETUI works council.
She has a postgraduate degree in social and labour law from the Sorbonne in Paris and has authored and co-authored a wide range of studies on trade union issues.
Hubertus Heil has been Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs since March 2018. Having studied political science, he is particularly committed to using his office to give everyone the chance to lead a self-determined life, while providing protection and security in times of change. Since December 2019, Hubertus Heil has been Deputy Chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), of which he has been a member since 1988. Since 1998, he has also represented the Gifhorn-Peine constituency in Lower Saxony with a direct mandate in the German Bundestag.
He is married and has two children.
Martin Knapp has worked for the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) for 34 years, mainly in South-eastern Europe, as well as at headquarters in Berlin. Most recently, he was managing director of the German-Serbian Chamber of Commerce in Belgrade. He is currently working on international sustainability issues at DIHK.
Martin Schulz, a Member of the 19th German Bundestag, has been President of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V. since 14 December 2020. He was previously Party Chair of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), chancellorship candidate and a long-time Member of the European Parliament, where he served as President for two terms from 2012 to 2017. Martin Schulz is also a Charlemagne Prize laureate, conferred on him in recognition of his outstanding contribution to strengthening the European Parliament and democratic legitimacy in the EU.
Michael Windfuhr studied political science, German studies, geography and philosophy at Heidelberg. Since 2011 he has been deputy director of the German Institute for Human Rights. In 2016 and 2020 he was elected member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Since 2017 he has chaired the working group on business and human rights of the German government’s CSR Forum, which advises the government on corporate social responsibility. Since 2020 he has also chaired Grüner Knopf’s expert advisory council.
He previously headed the human rights team at Brot für die Welt (2006–2010) and had various roles at FIAN International between 1986 and 2006.
Albert Kruft was chair of Solvay’s European Works Council and coordinator of the Solvay Global Forum until 31 July 2022. He is now a consultant for them. Following his studies as a chemical technician, he started his professional life with Solvay in 1973. During his long career, his roles there have included production manager, business economist and head of the logistics department. He began his union activities as a member of the local works council and he then became a member of the central works council. In 1996 he joined the European Works Council as a representative from Germany. In 2014, Mr Kruft was elected chair of the central works council from Germany and took on the full-time position of employee representative. Mr Kruft was the one of the architects of Solvay’s Global Forum, launched in 2016. He has been a member of many working groups at European level.
Lara Wolters is a Dutch Social Democrat Member of the European Parliament, serving as Vice Chair of the Legal Affairs committee, and member of the Budget Control and Internal Market committees. The focus of Lara’s work is on transparency and accountability, both among business and EU institutions, including as draftsperson for new EU legislation on corporate due diligence. This legislation will set binding requirements on enterprises to respect human rights and the environment in their value chains. She was also responsible for securing a recent deal establishing legislation for gender balance on company boards, and worked on reforming corporate reporting rules to meet the latest sustainability benchmarks. Elsewhere she has been instrumental in calling for EU funds to be linked to the rule of law, and has been a strong advocate for media freedom, for instance calling for an EU anti-SLAPP Directive.
Dr Steffen Schwartz-Höfler, born in Oldenburg in 1983, has been involved in the sustainability debate for many years. He studied political science, geography and communications at the University of Münster, focusing on various areas of sustainability research. The study ‘Sustainability as complexity trap’ was published in 2015 to promote the Institute for Political Science.
Steffen Schwartz-Höfler has worked since 2018 as head of sustainability at Continental AG in Hannover and directs global sustainability activities. In this endeavour he is involved, among others, with econsense, the sustainability network of German business. Before that he worked at industrial multinational Thyssenkrupp for 10 years in various positions in sustainability management and reporting.