*ETUI-Sotiria Theodoropoulou 49 results

"Given the political significance of this European election year, ETUI and ETUC have chosen to provide a retrospective assessment of the state of Social Europe. Using fact-based evidence and analysis, the new edition of the yearly Benchmarking working Europe demonstrates that the new impetus for Social Europe which we have witnessed over the past five years has led to important and long-awaited policy initiatives such as the adoption of the Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages in October 2022. However, progress in this field remains fragile.

According to the authors of the Benchmarking Working Europe, the 'revival' of Social Europe has been driven by three factors: the Social Pillar; a novel approach to EU spending and temporary relaxing of the EU fiscal framework; and the commitment of the European Green Deal to just transition. While each chapter in these reports highlights how each of these drivers has been essential in relaunching the process of a more social European integration, it also shows the inherent fragility of the project itself.

Among the relevant legislative decisions, initiated by the adoption of the European Socle of Social Rights in 2017 and taken in the context of unexpected events, such as the Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the inflation and cost-of-living crisis, the report quotes:

-the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive
-the Platform Worker Directive
-the Pay Transparency Directive
-the Women on Corporate Boards Directive
-the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive
-the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive
-and several Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Directives, including the revision of the Asbestos Directive.
Background
The yearly ETUI-ETUC report Benchmarking Working Europe (henceforth ‘Benchmarking') has the ambition, since 2001, to diminish the knowledge gap about the world of labour and social affairs by providing a genuine benchmarking exercise, with workers' concerns at the centre of its analysis and policy proposals. "

"Policy pointers
• The proposed economic governance rules should match the elevated importance they attribute to public investment, with fewer constraints on Member States to undertake the necessary investment to meet pressing common priorities, such as the just green transition and upward social convergence.
• More flexible safeguards on net public expenditure and/or special treatment of types of public investment, especially those explicitly combining green and social objectives (‘eco social public investment') and those aimed at high quality jobs, by means of a ‘golden rule' or a different amortisation of their cost over a longer period, would be ways forward.
• Eventually, a more permanent and powerful EU fiscal capacity should be established to complement national efforts to meet common priorities."

"The central questions and main contextual background explored by this year's issue of Benchmarking are, at their core, fairly straightforward. Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions at once: a (perhaps less than obvious) economic policy transition best exemplified by the debates surrounding the EU economic governance framework (COM(2022) 583 final); a geopolitical transition, increasingly shaped by the ‘open strategic autonomy' debate (Akgüç 2021) and, of course, by the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine; and the two more readily acknowledged green and digital transitions. It is, however, becoming increasingly clear, as explored in greater detail in the following chapters, that these four transitions imply important trade-offs and have significant ramifications for the social dimension of the European project and for the livelihoods of European workers. These consequences are currently being ignored by the principal institutional actors that are shaping them and that, at times, have conflicting priorities.

The current inability on the part of governments and policy-makers, at a national and supranational level, to resolve the tensions inherent to these transitions is a major factor in determining what the following pages of this issue refer to as a ‘polycrisis'. We understand the current conjuncture as a ‘polycrisis' due to the presence of a series of multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously (e.g. a climate crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a geopolitical crisis, etc.), due to the way in which these separate crises interact with each other (for instance the energy crisis and the climate crisis), and due to the extent to which they thus amplify each other's effects, in particular social and economic effects (the extent to which strained supply chains and externally driven inflationary pressures tend to magnify the shortcomings of current fiscal policies, for instance, as noted in the opening chapter). There is also a growing perception that resolving any of these crises in isolation may be a particularly arduous task and that cumulative responses must be identified.

This polycrisis is intimately linked to the inability of the ruling class to engage with what we identify here as the missing transition: the social transition. This issue of Benchmarking Working Europe engages critically with these four transitions and their effects and posits that only a transformative and ambitious social transition can break the current cycle of crisis after crisis and instead institutionalise what the issue refers to as ‘sustainable resilience'.

The four transitions – and the missing one
We are arguably witnessing four major discernible and disruptive transition processes that are shaking the kaleidoscope of the European project as it is currently still enshrined in the (fragile) constitutional consensus embodied by the Lisbon Treaty. The rather more obvious (but no less challenging) processes are the green and technological transitions. Yet, it is arguable that, most visibly since the suspension of parts of the Stability and Growth Pact, we have also been experiencing an economic policy (including a monetary policy) transition and – in connection with the supply chain shortages caused by Covid‑19 and its aftermath, and more markedly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine – a geopolitical transition linked to the developing concept of ‘open strategic autonomy'"

"High inflation, virtually unknown in advanced economies since the 1980s, has made a comeback. In this policy paper, we first explain where inflation comes from, and describe how the policy context for dealing with it was shaped after Keynesian demand management proved unable to defeat stagflation. We then critically examine the various policy options. Generally speaking, policy makers may attempt to (i) contain inflation by raising interest rates or, more directly, by controlling prices, (ii) alleviate the impact of inflation on household budgets through price subsidies or income transfers, and (iii) protect workers' real incomes via wage indexation and social pacts. We conclude by assessing the merits, costs, and distributional implications of each option in turn."

"This chapter examines the recent evolution of inflation and its drivers in Greece, as well as the policies undertaken to limit its increase and mitigate its impact on households and firms. Greece is an interesting case as the current inflationary episode and the challenges it creates for real incomes is the third major economic shock that the country and its population have undergone since 2010, following the public debt crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, from which the economy had just recovered. As elsewhere in the Euro Area, energy inflation has been the main driver of the Greek headline inflation and we illustrate the various reasons why this has been so, most notably the high natural gas distribution costs (a consequence of high market concentration) with its impact on electricity costs, and the elevated indirect taxes on energy. Inflation has had a detrimental effect on wage earners in Greece with real wages falling, while the wage share has also been in steady decline. Profit shares have been holding up or even increasing, suggesting a regressive effect from inflation. The Greek government has been going to great lengths to mitigate the impact of energy inflation on households and companies and to limit its rise, spending €9.8bn or 5.4% of GDP between September 2021 and October 2022, the fourth highest percentage of GDP in the EU, mostly on horizontal subsidies, without income criteria, or, until October 2022, even any incentives to reduce energy demand. A preliminary assessment of these measures suggests that inadequate targeting of vulnerable households means that, despite the high levels of expenditure, policy has not substantially alleviated the regressive impact of inflation, especially on households with lingering financial fragility from the previous two economic shocks experienced since 2010."