Mario Sepi is the President of the European Economic and Social Committee since October 2008

He has been an EESC member since 1995 and has shown great commitment to European economic and social policy: among the key opinions for which he has been rapporteur was the 2002 owninitiative opinion on Trends, structures and institutional mechanisms of the international capital markets.

He has also written opinions on competition policy, European industrial policy and monetary union, among other things, and he was a member of the study group that prepared the opinion of the Committee on EMU and industrial relations – and the Lisbon strategy

Since the 1960s he has been following European issues with particular reference to social and labour matters in Europe and has been part of the European federalist movement as secretary of the Roman section of the Federalist Youth Movement.

He has been concerned with social and trade union policy in Europe since 1966, when he was a researcher with the Institute of International Affairs (IAI), whose president at the time was Altiero Spinelli, and from 1969 to 1974 he worked with the Economic and Social Committee as an expert on relations with the Mediterranean countries.

For his first job with this institute, Mario Sepi wrote an essay on the role of the Economic and Social Committee.

He was an active trade unionist with the CISL in the 1970s and 1980s: first as an international policy expert and then as National Secretary of the FIM (Italian Metalworkers' Federation), responsible for industrial and contract policy. He is also a member of the EMF (European Metalworkers' Federation).

He was among those who got the union to sign the FIAT agreement in 1984, which ended the long crisis that had begun as a result of the struggles of 1980.

He is strongly committed to development cooperation. He has placed the idea of the social development of civil society at the heart of relations with non-member countries and has promoted many training activities with countries such as Mozambique, Mali, Chile and Brazil.