The European Trade Union Institute

The ETUI is seeking a new General Director to take office in March 2023, or soon thereafter. Candidates will need to have, among other things, extensive experience in leading medium-sized organisations in a dynamic and innovative work environment, as well as in-depth knowledge about European social, economic, environmental and climate policies and industrial relations.

One should be careful using the word ‘historic’. But in the case of the directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union it might actually be appropriate.

The Transnational Trade Union Rights Experts Network (TTUR) has recently released an edited book on the enforcement of EU labour law. Enforcement is the key ingredient that makes rights effective and ensures compliance. It can make or break a legal system. Despite this, enforcement of EU labour law has received little scholarly attention in recent decades and has rarely been examined in a comprehensive way. 

Just transition is becoming an increasingly popular concept to address the social consequences of industrial decarbonization, which EU countries have committed to pursue through the European Green Deal. However, a review of the reference literature shows that the role of just transition in policy design has so far been largely overlooked by existing empirical studies. 

Even in Continental Europe, trade unions are the most powerful voice defending outsiders in welfare state politics, and reducing their institutional power in unemployment insurance and elsewhere will likely make things worse for outsiders and not – as certain political leaders in these countries often imply – make things better.

The draft Directive on improving working conditions in platform work (Platform Work Directive) clarifies the employment status and working conditions of platform workers. Importantly, it also focuses on regulating algorithmic management. While a step in the right direction, the chapter on algorithmic management fails to deliver the full benefits workers might have expected:by importing some GDPR rights only into the draft Platform Work Directive without fixing pre-existing shortcomings, the legislator has helped to foster an inconsistent regulatory environment that places workers in legal uncertainty and unable to exercise important rights.

This study examines the development and implementation of judicial strategies by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) over the last fifteen years. Firstly, the author shows that this strategy was born in the wake of the Viking and Laval cases, with the aim of using the standards and complaint mechanisms of the Council of Europe and the International Labour Organisation to overturn those case laws.

In France, the legal obligation for private-sector companies to have, under certain conditions, one or two employee representatives on their boards goes hand in hand with the possibility for the company to decide to have its European Works Council (EWC) or SE Works Council (SE-WC) appoint the second member. This has become the preferred option for French companies.

One key activity for the ETUI is to fill the gaps in the analysis of the impact of the green transition on employment, in the knowledge that the employment effect of decarbonisation policies is very much under-researched. Some of these questions are being explored at the sectoral level (jobs and regions) or even also with a view to supporting the labour movement. We are running this project in collaboration with key external partners, such as the European Climate Foundation, and with a focus on specific strategic sectors, such as the automotive sector, energy-intensive industries or public services. 

The automotive industry finds itself in a paradigm change, some call it a revolution, others say mobility will cease to exist in the way we know it. It is no exaggeration to say that every job in the mobility sector will be disrupted in some way. One key lesson of country reports and transversal studies of this project is that while electrification of individual road transport is the focus, i.e. the change of the propulsion system from fossil fuels to clean electricity, the transformation is much more comprehensive.