The European Trade Union Institute

The European Union is currently fighting on two main fronts, Covid-19 and climate change, though with skirmishes elsewhere – including migration and the rule of law. While science seems to be slowly gaining the upper hand in the fight against the pandemic, despite setbacks like the latest Omicron attack, Covid-19 continues to hold global society in its grip. But the second nut is even harder to crack. 

This report examines how and why the Semester became part of the governance of the RRF. We also ask to what extent this new set-up has changed the power balance among key EU actors (for example, financial and economic actors versus institutional social affairs actors)?

The European Green Deal sets out very ambitious goals for the EU. Carbon neutrality should be reached in 2050. The intermediate goal is a reduction in CO2 emissions of 55 per cent by 2030 compared with the 2005 level. In July 2021, the European Commission delivered the ‘Fit for 55’ package, which contains policy proposals for achieving the ambitious goals of the European Green Deal.

More and more nation states are now committing to net-zero carbon by 2050 at the latest, which is encouraging, but none have faced up to the  transformation of economies, societies and lives that this will entail. This paper considers two scenarios for sustainable welfare and discusses the implications for contemporary incomes, jobs and welfare states. It is necessarily restricted to the EU and similarly rich countries of the developed world. 

In this issue, our main aim has been to illustrate and document the impact of Covid-19 on workers and the experience of the pandemic as an occupational health and safety issue around Europe.

The new ETUI strategy for the next 4 years was built on the basis of an inclusive methodology where each internal and external stakeholder has taken an active role in the building process. The strategy has followed different paths of consultation and feedback to finish with an ETUI internal approval and ETUC endorsement in November 2019. The strategy was presented to the Trade Unions Education community at the EduDays held in Vienna from 28 to 29 November 2019.

Rising wage inequality is disproportionately driven by widening differences in pay between firms. This can reflect that firms’ workforces are increasingly homogenous but also that the pay of similar workers increasingly differs depending on firm productivity and the way that is shared with the work­ force.

Following the adoption of Council directive 94/45/EC (the EWC directive) more than 1,250 EWCs were established. This industrial relations institution was intended to ensure transnational information and consultation were available to worker representatives within MNCs that met the thresholds of the legislation. Initially, the quality of information and consultation met neither standards required by the directive nor those specified in EU Charters and Treaties. In consequence, a recast directive (2009/38/EC) was adopted with the intention of remedying the shortcomings of the initial legislation.

The Covid‑19 pandemic has disproportionately affected women, threatening to reverse progress towards gender equality. It has made the need to address long‑standing structural disadvantages affecting women even more evident and pressing, including the fact that women continue to perform a greater share of unpaid care work. 

It has almost become a cliché to say that the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities while also generating new ones. However, the following pages of this year’s Benchmarking Working Europe clearly reveal that, far from being a platitude, the nexus between the pandemic and rising inequalities is both increasingly measurable and alarming. But they also stress that inequality is not just a one-off historical incident linked to a particular crisis. It is in fact the product of an economic model that, for the past three decades, has progressively redistributed less and less wealth to the bottom percentiles of society, while accumulating more and more at the top. In other words, it is a structural problem. Given the corrosive impact that inequalities are having on the social and economic, let alone political and democratic, fabric of our societies, the policy responses to the problem of inequality must be equally structural in character.