A year on from the advent of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) what difference has it made?
Europe’s citizens, still reeling from nearly a decade of Austerity and increasingly expressing their anger through the ballot box and on the streets, might say ‘not much’. But behind the scenes there are tentative signs that change is afoot.
Ten years after the financial crisis of 2008–09 policymakers’ attention is visibly shifting from fiscal consolidation towards mending societies. The political declaration of the EPSR as the lodestar of its new social policy framework was a welcome indication of new attitudes at the highest political level in the European Union. The ESPR has the potential to contribute to a more ambitious ‘European Social Union’. It is already having practical effects. The EPSR’s new ‘rights-based social investment approach’ is leaving its mark on the 2018 European Semester and has triggered two batches of legislation: the ‘Pillar Package’ and the ‘Social Fairness Package’.
So far so good, but can we expect this progress to continue? Leading experts contributing to the annual stocktake of the state of play of Social Europe, jointly published this week by the ETUI and the European Social Observatory, are cautiously optimistic. They will present their views at a launch event in Brussels on 11th December.
Europe is already dealing with new social and economic risks of climate change, the demographic transition and digitalisation of the workplace — themes explored in the ETUI-ETUC conference last June. These have to be tackled alongside more familiar and seemingly intractable challenges of youth unemployment, outdated skills, regional inequalities and gender and race-based discrimination. The task of delivering a fairer society can often look daunting. Contributors to the ETUI-OSE study have therefore, as usual, focused on what practical steps can be taken to help the EPSR do its job.
Among the suggestions are calls for a fully-fledged ‘European Social Union’, which would combine the functional coherence and efectiveness of Monetary Union as well as its political legitimacy. On climate change, there is a strong argument for introducing a concept of ‘sustainable welfare’ to guide research and policy. This would integrate social inequality with environmental sustainability by fostering ‘eco-social’ policies that ensure that a ‘Just transition’ to a Greener economy is one where the burdens of adjustment are shared out fairly.
But this practical stuff is also balanced by the realisation that good intentions, even those backed by legal principles, are not always enough. While trade unions naturally welcome the EPSR they also need to carefully examine the different legislative proposals and ensure social partner consultation on how these are put into effect. Moreover, with labour markets becoming more diverse, there is a need to ensure social protection for marginalised sets of workers such as the self-employed. Digitalisation of the economy brings many benefits, but also changes to employment conditions and job quality which must be monitored and the role the EPSR can play in this is currently unclear.
Health and Safety at work, which was recently the focus of a recent ETUI conference on occupational cancer, is an important focus of trade unions, and with 100,000 people a year dying unnecessarily this is not surprising. Upward harmonisation of working conditions in Europe is still a stated objective, but far fewer actual initiatives have actually been launched, however. Will the EPSR, despite recent progress in the prevention of occupation cancers, also leave its stamp on occupational health and safety, a field in which workers’ interests continue to be largely subordinate to business interests?
A lot of unanswered questions, then, beneath the optimism. And a lot of work still to do.
Have you read or seen
- Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2018, Bart Vanhercke, Dalila Ghailani and Sebastiano Sabato
- Drifting into labour market insecurity? Labour market reforms in Europe after 2010, Sotiria Theodoropoulou
- Bridging the gaps or falling short? The European Pillar of Social Rights and what it can bring to EU-level policymaking, Zane Rasnača
- Benchmarking Working Europe 2018
- Strengthening the EU’s social dimension: using the EMU to make the most out of the Social Pillar, Zane Rasnača (ETUI) and Sotiria Theodoropoulou (ETUI)
- Cancer and work: understanding occupational cancers and taking action to eliminate them, Tony Musu (ETUI) and Laurent Vogel (ETUI)
- The European pillar of social rights: critical legal analysis and proposals, Klaus Lörcher and Isabelle Schömann (ETUI)
