Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research

Over the past years the centre of the economic crisis has repeatedly shifted. Starting as a subprime crisis in the US, it soon unfolded as a global economic and financial crisis in order then to become a sovereign debt crisis, euro crisis and, eventually, also a social and democratic crisis. Against the background of the general political and economic conditions within the EU, this article traces the shifts of the political terrain. It focuses above all on the transition from a rather costly crisis management (bank rescues, economic stimulus programmes and automatic stabilizers) towards a new agenda of austerity policies. Structurally, this agenda can be seen as the reaction to significant increases in public debt. In addition, it has been promoted politically and institutionalized through successive European economic governance reforms. These reforms have also had a serious impact on domestic social and employment policies. In some countries dependent on external credits this is already evident, while in other countries the deregulatory aspects of the radicalized reform agenda have only just started to unfold.

This article offers a critical account of the ‘social’ in the Europe 2020 strategy, focusing on the new poverty target and the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion. The article reaches three main conclusions. First, while poverty is given a prominent place in the strategy and the recourse to targets is intended to harden up Member State and EU coordination in the field, the poverty target is loose and risks being rendered ineffective as an EU-wide target. Secondly, the social goals and philosophy of Europe 2020 are under-elaborated. While it is important that the poverty-related measures are treated on a similar basis to the other elements of Europe 2020, it is not made clear how growth will bring about the planned reduction in poverty. ‘Inclusive growth’ has little meaning in itself. This leads to the third conclusion which is that Europe 2020 lacks a coherent model of social development. Philosophically, it draws mainly from social investment and liberal approaches, neither of which has a strong orientation to addressing poverty.

As the successor to the decade-long Lisbon agenda, Europe 2020 is the European Union’s 10-year strategy for ‘smart’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘inclusive’ growth. This article analyses the ‘governance architecture’ of this new agenda, and, more particularly, its social dimension. Insofar as Europe 2020 has a social dimension it is located within a suite of thematic ‘flagship initiatives’, as well as within a policy coordination framework that, while building upon the Lisbon agenda’s governance architecture, now forms part of the European Semester framework. Whereas the flagship initiatives continue a long tradition of the deployment of non-legislative instruments and EU funds towards the EU’s social goals, the role to be played by the ‘open method of coordination’ as a ‘new’ post-Lisbon form of EU social governance remains unclear. Indeed, the risk is that political energy will be concentrated on policy coordination as a means of strengthening EU economic governance rather than as a vehicle for articulating a progressive social policy vision.

This article examines how the recent global recession, together with the general flexibilization of labour markets, is affecting young people. We examine different forms of social exclusion, including unemployment, temporary employment contracts and periods of inactivity, as well as the subjective insecurity arising from such labour market exclusion. We also examine what Member States have done to address this issue, especially as part of their response to the crisis. At both EU (through the Europe 2020 strategy) and national levels specific policy measures exist that target young people in the labour market, but these are mostly supply-driven. Thus, they do not take into account the true problems young people are facing, including problems finding first-time employment and bad-quality jobs with little prospect of moving up the employment ladder. In conclusion, a new generation with higher exposure to systematic labour market risks than previous generations is being left to fend for itself with little appropriate state support.

This article analyses how the social objective of protecting lower earners from old-age poverty is supported at the EU level. It argues that although the Member States are responsible for pension policy, the EU framework could empower domestic social policy actors by providing them with cognitive and normative resources. The analysis is based on the situation in three countries: Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom. The article shows that there are well developed shared data and indicators, but that there is limited scope for common interpretation of the data. There is also a lack of common policy solutions due to two diverging pension reform paradigms: the adequacy paradigm and the sustainability paradigm. Although the latter increasingly has incorporated an adequacy perspective that limits pure cost containment policies, Europe 2020 limits the scope for positive social policy measures linked to the adequacy approach because it prioritizes a low tax wedge and growth-enhancing initiatives.

Quality of work is a core element of the European social model. In this article we analyse the role and instruments of EU actors in this policy area in order to discover the extent to which it has been institutionalized since the mid-1990s. We first demonstrate that quality of work has to be understood as a multi-dimensional concept, before analysing the respective roles of and interactions between the Council, the Commission, the European Parliament and the social partners. Both the definition of the subject as a policy problem and the construction of a comprehensive indicator-based monitoring tool represent necessary, albeit not sufficient, steps to promote the quality dimension of work. The article is based on document and secondary literature analysis as well as expert interviews.