The European Trade Union Institute

In this episode of etui.podcast we will explore the whys and the hows of Google's Alphabet workers union and what this experience means for the wider trade union movement. 

With work a key vector of Covid‑19 transmission, this report examines why it is critical that occupational health and safety measures take centre stage in mitigation policies. Workers in sectors declared essential by state authorities have been mandated to continue working in physical settings during the pandemic.

Several such sectors involve many face‑to‑face contacts with colleagues and clients, meaning that workers face a higher risk of exposure to Covid‑19. Unregulated safety measures, a lack of personal protective equipment and crowded settings further increase the risk in these sectors. Persisting inequalities are exacerbated by the pandemic, as low‑wage workers, workers from ethnic minorities, migrant workers and women are overrepresented in these sectors. They also face intersecting factors, including precarious contracts, job insecurity, inadequate paid sick leave, a lack of bargaining power and low socioeconomic status.

The EU-UK TCA goes beyond the diluted, and at times tokenistic, protection of multilateral labour standards contained in the other FTAs concluded by the EU, e.g. with countries like Canada or South Korea.

However, the few additional labour clauses it contains, and the overall weak supervision and dispute resolution procedures applying to them, offer an unsatisfactory regulatory framework, one that is unlikely to deter future UK Government from eroding presentday standards.

The implementation of the labour provisions in the TCA will require close monitoring in the years to come and should become one of the priorities of the five-year review catered for by Article FINPROV.3.

Despite a spectacular economic reaction to the pandemic crisis, which stands in stark contrast to the austerity-driven response to the 2008 financial and economic crisis, Bart Vanhercke and the co-authors of Bilan Social express concerns about the so-called ‘social affairs players’ being sidelined in the new Recovery and Resilience Facility,  the fuzzy EU commitment to gender issues, the EU response to rising in-work poverty and the setting a new social-ecological contract.

The pandemic's longer-term economic consequences are not clear at this stage. No one can exclude that a real social crisis will quickly follow the vaccination campaign in the headlines. For the time being, however, it’s the unprecedented –and unexpected coordinated response by the EU’s and its 27 Members States and the European Commission that stands out. The EU’s response indeed contributed to mitigate the impact on unemployment (compared to the rest of the world) and demonstrated that the EU can react quickly and forcefully.

This working paper identifies some key areas of policy intervention for advancing socially sustainable and fair solutions for freelancers working in the creative industries, who are among those have suffered the most from the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In particular, the authors focus on those who work entirely on their own account, without employees (i.e. the ‘solo self-employed’), and who undertake project- or task-based work on a fixed-term basis. While demand for some services (e.g. ICT services, software development, digital communication, media, medical translation and audiobooks) has grown, due to their digital nature or essentiality in the post-Covid reality, other types of creative work have suffered due to increased competition, decreased demand, or because they were entirely put on hold due to the pandemic.

The lockdown and other restrictive measures introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic recession have had a strong impact on labour markets worldwide. As far as the European Union (EU) is concerned, the accelerated fall in total employment was the ‘sharpest decline ever observed over two successive quarters since 1995’. Unemployment, however, decreased moderately over 2020, although to differing extents in individual Member States and at different paces during the various lockdown phases. This exceptional and unpredictable context puts the pivotal role of social protection squarely in the spotlight, reminding policymakers and citizens of the essential role of strong social security to cushion against potential disastrous social impacts and job destruction. Various job retention schemes have played an important role as automatic stabilisers to preserve millions of jobs.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected women disproportionately and is likely to have adverse effects on gender equality. It is essential that efforts to promote gender equality be increased in order to ensure that hard-won progress in this area is not reversed.

As part of this effort, the European Commission should table a proposal on binding pay transparency measures strengthening the principle of equal pay between men and women, in accordance with the Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025.

The need to effectively tackle global warming puts under pressure the existing industrial relations models in Europe. A new logic of sustainability needs to be incorporated into the social contracts in order to (re)build harmonious labour relations. A viable world of labour requires a new sustainability paradigm, which encompasses all three of its dimensions: economic, social and environmental.

Achieving economic sustainability (within the planetary boundaries) has become more challenging. Actual economic growth has come at a critically high cost in terms of inequality of opportunities and outcomes, planetary resources, biodiversity and environmental degradation, thus undermining both social and environmental sustainability. Social sustainability is also likely to come under increasing pressure from the impending fourth industrial revolution. In turn, widening inequality and climate change are forcing us to question the way we measure prosperity and wellbeing.

The effect of technology cannot be limited to a dichotomy of increasing versus decreasing degrees of routine. Instead, there are basic scenarios as far as the routine content of activities is concerned: a) no change in routine; b) increased routine; c) transformed routine; d) reduced routine.

SEER - Journal for labour and social affairs in Eastern Europe

This second issue of the SEER Journal for labour and social affairs in Eastern Europe for 2020 focuses on the heritage of the Dayton peace agreement 25 years after its signature as well as on wider EU-western Balkans relations.

Following the dissolution of the former state of Yugoslavia, by early 1992 the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) had voted in a referendum on a sovereign and independent BiH, recognised by the international community but not by the Bosnian Serb Democratic Party (SDS) and by Milosevic's Serbia. War and genocide followed. The Dayton accords put an end to the 3 1/2 years of the Bosnian War, one of the wars hitting former Yugoslavia, setting Bosnia and Herzegovina and, with it, the entire western Balkans region on an eventual path towards European integration.