Evelyn Astor is an Economic and Social Policy Advisor at the International Trade Union Confederation, a global organization representing over 330 trade unions from 163 countries. Within this post, she provides advisory support to trade unions in their campaigns and advocacy work for minimum living wages, safe and secure working conditions, and access to social protection. She also represents the interests of workers at international level on the topics of social protection and wages, including at the International Labour Organisation, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, UN Commission on the Status of Women, among others. She currently serves on the steering board of the ILO's Flagship Programme for Social Protection Floors and the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection, as well as on the advisory board for Migration and Transnational Social Protection in Post-crisis Europe (MiTSoPro), a research project financed by the European Research Council.
Prior to joining the ITUC in 2017, she worked for several years at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Employment and Social Affairs, where she contributed to developing several EU initiatives in the areas of social protection and gender equality in the labour market – including the European Pillar of Social Rights and the Work Life Balance Directive.
Evelyn is an experienced speaker, moderator and debator and has spoken to diverse and high-level audiences across the world, including at conferences and meetings organised by the ILO, OECD, European Commission, World Bank, IMF and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
She has given numerous presentations on economic and social policy issues in English (mother tongue), French and Spanish.
She moderated a ministerial panel on financing social protection at the Global Partnership of Universal Social Protection conference in 2019. She participated in a high-level debate on work-life balance with labour ministers and experts organised by the OECD in 2018. She was a speaker in a debate on financing social protection organised by Oxfam at the European Development Days 2019. She was a panelist in a session on living wages at the Ethical Trade Initiative’s 20 year anniversary conference in 2018. She participated in the high-level opening panel of the ILO Development Partners meeting on 2017 in Geneva. She gave a keynote presentation at a Belgium national symposium on inequalities organised by the Belgian General Federation of Labour (FGTB-ABVV) in 2019.
She has given statements to the press and has been interviewed in podcasts.