The European Trade Union Institute

The Porto Social Summit will give political impetus to the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights and its action plan, underlining its central role in the European recovery and the adaptation to the climate, digital and demographic transitions.

The 20th edition of the joint ETUC and ETUI yearly publication Benchmarking Working Europe has been released. The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic recession offers the crudest and harshest of “stress tests” to probe the ability and willingness of the EU to emerge from this new crisis without repeating some of the mistakes of the past. Without the pandemic the report would have continued to dissect the variety of EU economic policies and benchmark their effects against the needs and the living conditions of European workers. Instead, this 20th anniversary issue of the Benchmarking report explores the challenges posed by the pandemic on both European economies and the world of work - challenges such as unemployment, rising public debt, shortages in the health and care sectors - and sets out the case for a socially responsible and ecologically sustainable road out of the Covid-19 crisis. Key elements in this strategy are the need for unprecedented levels of public spending, the acknowledgement of the redistributive function of decent working conditions and fair wages, and last but not least the recognition of industrial democracy as a key pillar for the current recovery strategy. All those aspects need to be developed and reconciled with the overarching priority of a just transition to a green economy, which is undoubtedly the greatest challenge that Europe needs to embrace in the years to come.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.