Documents EU policy 4 056 results

"As Europe grapples with geopolitical upheavals, economic shifts and the urgency of a just, green transition, the future of strong social policies at EU level may seem uncertain. How can the EU balance security and competitiveness without compromising its social and just transition commitments? What lessons can be learned from the successes and setbacks of the von der Leyen I Commission? How will the new economic governance framework affect Social Europe? These are the key questions that guide Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2024.

With the EU entering a new political cycle under the von der Leyen II Commission, concerns are mounting over whether Social Europe can withstand the growing dominance of competitiveness and security imperatives. While significant steps have been taken in the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights, the shift toward competitiveness as the EU's primary objective raises doubts over the future of social progress. Moreover, while the frugal nature of the Stability and Growth Pact underpinning the common currency has been somewhat alleviated by a reform of its preventive arm, fiscal consolidation remains a significant policy steamroller. This book assesses key developments such as the Platform Work Directive, advances in pay transparency, and the EU's evolving approach to just transition, while critically examining the changing role of social policy.

The new Commission's focus on skills, training, and quality reflects a broader transformation of the EU's social agenda — one that emphasizes investment in human capital as a means to drive competitiveness. Yet, as this volume highlights, this ‘social investment' approach risks neglecting the buffer function of welfare states: the essential role of social protection in shielding citizens from economic shocks and inequality. In turn, this raises a fundamental question: will Social Europe continue its momentum, or will it be sidelined by the EU's evolving priorities? With rising geopolitical tensions and pressures for increased security spending, the risk of social investment being crowded out is real. The policy shifts documented in this book invite reflection on whether the EU's ‘social turn' of recent years can be sustained — or whether a new paradigm is emerging, one in which social rights must compete for relevance in an era defined by competitiveness and security challenges."

"2024 was an important year for gender equality in the EU. In May, the first-ever Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence as well as two Directives on strengthening the role of equality bodies were adopted. The former introduced inter alia EU-level definitions of a number of crimes, in particular regarding cyberviolence. The Directive implements, reinforces and complements the ratification of the Istanbul Convention by the EU in 2023. This is much needed: the EU-wide survey on gender-based violence, carried out by Eurostat, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and the European Institute for Gender Equality and published in November 2024, shows that violence against women is still pervasive: one in three women have experienced physical (including threats) or sexual violence in adulthood, one in six have experienced sexual violence, including rape and one in five women have faced domestic violence – specifically physical or sexual violence from their partner, a relative, or another member of their household. The report focuses on the key actions and achievements of EU institutions and Member States in this area over the past year. It also provides encouraging examples of national initiatives on gender equality and of EU-funded projects aimed at gender equality (in boxes). This edition of the report is the fifth one covering the EU Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025. It mostly looks back at the last year of the first Commission headed by President Von der Leyen, though it also covers the first months of her second mandate, which started on 1 December 2024, with a new college of Commissioners, including a Commissioner for Equality, Ms Lahbib. On 5 March 2025, the Commission plans to adopt a Roadmap for women's rights a key deliverable of President von der Leyen's political guidelines. The Roadmap will set out the key gender equality principles for the years ahead. It will help frame the work for a new Gender Equality Strategy and serve as a compass towards greater gender equality in the EU. Progress made will be reflected in the future editions of the Gender Equality Report. A new Gender Equality Strategy post 2025 will present the concrete actions, measures and initiatives that the EU intends to undertake over the next several years. Both, the roadmap and the strategy will be the opportunity to keep momentum on still much needed policy changes that will eventually allow the long-term vision for full gender equality set out in the roadmap to become a reality."

"This report provides a broad description of the adoption of generative AI (or GenAI) within the European public sector. It focuses on (i) guidelines and policies adopted within administrations to regulate the use of this emerging technology; and (ii) the multiple applications and use cases found in the Public Sector Tech Watch observatory. The public sector is quickly adopting GenAI solutions, but administrations are facing daily challenges related to implementation processes and effective public-private collaborations. Administrations are also facing other challenges in their regulatory eff o r t s , primarily centred around human oversight; accountability; the importance of data protection; and governance, safety, fairness and transparency."

"The revision of the Posting of Workers Directive (PWD) was welcomed as an important step towards a more Social Europe. In this article, we examine how EU member states (MS) implemented the revised directive. We focus on those parts of the directive that should enable MS to reverse previous negative integration by the European Court of Justice. Despite the initial enthusiasm, the revision has led to only minor changes in national labour law. We ask why MS that actively pushed for the revision did not exploit the new regulatory possibilities further. In addition to presenting comparative data on national implementation, we conduct in-depth case studies of countries that supported the revision at the EU level (Denmark, Finland, Germany). Disagreements between employers and trade unions, partisan effects, and institutional misfit between the PWD and national wage-settingsystems explain the limited impact of the revision in these MS. The revision of the PWD shows how difficult it is to politically counteract the market-making impetus of European single market law."

"In this paper, we investigate the adaptation of the EU climate stances between the early 2000s until today. Historically tracing the EU's approach to the green transition, we highlight an increasing role of interventionist frames within European discourses and policies. As the realms of intervention have increased, so has the EU's emphasis on the need to provide social protection for the sections of the population that have more to lose from a large-scale transition. We understand this process as signalling the increasing relevance of what we call the Compensatory State. This concept points to a form of governance that, by setting itself ambitious goals that (if implemented) would have widespread effects on large portions of the population, needs to produce equally extended forms of compensations. The paper historically traces the development of this form of governance from the previously prevalent frameworks (which we understand through the concepts of the Regulatory State and the Competitiveness-enhancing State). The paper integrates contemporary attempts to theorise the role of public authorities within the EU's green transition. In addition, our analysis challenges the expectations of the extant literature in political economy, which looks at increasing social protection mainly as a public solution to market distortions."

"The COVID-19 pandemic has completely disrupted the European labour markets. Demand has collapsed in certain sectors, teleworking has become the norm in others, and the use of digital technologies in services and businesses has experienced a significant acceleration. While the use of short-time work schemes contributed – especially in the initial months of the crisis – to preserving employment and avoiding massive layoffs, unemployment and the inactivity rates are increasing and this course is expected to continue. Such a constellation poses significant challenges to European labour markets. Multiple questions arise around job creation and destruction, up- and re-skilling of the labour force, spatial or sectoral relocation of dismissed workers and the quality of the newly created jobs..."

"The European Green Deal (EGD) is a growth strategy that seeks to combine climate action with economic stimuli. Climate action, however, inevitably creates winners and losers, at least in the short term. Zooming in on two examples of such actions—the phase-out of coal in Bulgaria and the mining for lithium (necessary for electric vehicle batteries) in Serbia—we point to the significant social implications of the EGD and how these give rise to conflicts that threaten to undermine the economic transformation envisioned for achieving climate neutrality. We show that the remedies put in place by the EU to deal with the social consequences of climate action are too narrow and fragmented and contain almost no legal obligations to promote a socially ‘just transition' that ‘leaves no-one behind'—the leitmotif of the EGD. We join forces here, as scholars of labour law and environmental law, to identify substantive and procedural legal safeguards that would strengthen the social element of the EU climate agenda and help mitigate some of the emerging conflicts and backlash against climate policies."

"This book primarily explores the welfare-policy responses to the Great Recession, reform trajectories that swept across Europe over the last decade, with a final chapter that focuses on Covid-19 welfare management. The 2008 crash marked a critical stress test for European welfare states with dramatic repercussions, including a massive surge in unemployment, a widening in wage and income disparities, and rising poverty. Hikes in fiscal deficits and public debt, required to pre-empt an economic meltdown, forced policymakers to make painful cuts in welfare services to shore up public finances, thereby jeopardizing welfare support for vulnerable groups. The overall scope of welfare-policy responses is heterogeneous, disparate, and uneven. In some cases, the response to the Great Recession was accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in others unpopular crisis-management measures received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions, and employer organizations. Alongside serious retrenchments, there have been assertive attempts to rebuild social programmes and institutions, to accommodate policy repertoires-not merely domestically but also at the EU level-to the new realities of the knowledge economy and an ageing society. Overall, the long 2010s showed that the future of work and welfare is in our hands: it is perfectly possible to shape this future in such a way as to provide inclusive social security, achieve high employment, advance and maintain human capabilities across the life-course, and fight poverty and inequality."

"Long-term unemployment is recognised as a stubborn challenge that has been confronting the Member States of the European Union for some time now. It affects the unemployed, their households and communities, and, if widespread, it also has negative impacts on the growth and stability prospects of an economy. In the search for remedial action, the idea of an EU-wide Job Guarantee (EU-JG) has recently gained currency among a wide range of European constituencies as an important policy innovation. This Report begins with an explanation of what a Job Guarantee would propose, theoretically and practically, and lays bare, through facts and statistical evidence, the state of play with regard to long-term unemployment in the EU context. It proceeds to familiarise the reader with the EU's experience of job guarantee initiatives and other direct job creation programmes that are currently being implemented, highlighting their similarities and differences. It then moves from the present to the future via a presentation of the contours of the principles, options and trade-offs upon which an EU-JG may be established, and also raises the question as to how this might be financed. The undertaking of the work presented in this report has been motivated by the interest of the ETUI and the ETUC to bring job guarantee-related information and evidence-based analysis to the fore so as to provide further support in deliberations and debate on this topic. The aim is to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about the efficacy, if not the imperative, of a European-wide Job Guarantee."