The European Trade Union Institute

This edited volume explores the need for a transformative approach to envisioning a just social and economic model. A cross-disciplinary team of academic experts was formed to develop this approach, with the aim of proposing concrete policy ideas that are both transformative and original. While these ideas should not be contingent on a revolutionary reconfiguration of the current relationship between capital and labour, they may lead to a radical rebalancing of power structures within societies.

This book reconstructs the history of the dramatic events of the second half of the 20th century that took place in certain eastern European countries, rocking the regimes that had been installed there on the Soviet model in the aftermath of the Second World War. The timeline covers a 40-year period from the 1953 workers’ rebellion in East Berlin, through the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, to the Solidarność movement in Poland in 1980-81. 

This policy brief provides an overview of the proposed changes in the economic governance rules and an assessment from the perspective of whether they are likely to trigger a return to fiscal austerity and narrow the space for the public investment needed to tackle the policy challenges facing Europe.

This report provides an overview of the ways in which EU and EEA Member States have regulated their social security frameworks in relation to short-term third-country national (TCN) migrant workers. It presents the result of an extensive mapping exercise carried out in 24 EU Member States, as well as Iceland and Norway, focussing on the relationship between migration and the social security coverage of different categories of short-term third-country national workers (for example, posted workers, intra-corporate transfers, seasonal workers, temporary agency workers, high-level professionals and self-employed).

As it becomes clearer and clearer that none of the 14 million jobs in the broad automobile industry will remain unaffected by the transition to e-mobility, less attention has been paid to what would happen if Europe’s car industry failed to keep pace with the global competition in fast-evolving zero emission technologies. A new book from ETUI reveals that further employment risks and growing inequalities may appear if European manufacturers continue to abandon the lower market segments of electric vehicles and leave these to foreign competitors.

The policy debate around rising labour shortages tends to focus on the need for skills and, where they are deemed to be missing, on bringing in those skills through immigration and mobility. Most discussions ignore the role of job quality, even though labour shortages have increased most and are worst in jobs with lower wages and worse conditions.

The European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) is providing a curated collection of resources on just transition and climate change. Here, you can find a wide range of publications, events, training activities, podcasts, and videos to deepen your knowledge and understanding of the topic. 

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.