This article concerns the effectiveness of the European Employment Strategy (EES) as a governance tool. It analyses the policy measures of the Member States with regard to the commonly agreed guidelines and the country-specific recommendations of the Council. To analyse the policy measures the paper introduces a new quantitative method, which is applied to ten EU Member States during 2005–2009. After presenting the results, the paper subsequently analyses the level of follow-up with regard to future intended reforms within the Member States and their level of responses to the country-specific recommendations. Although it is difficult to attribute the reforms within the Member States to the EES, the analysis reveals that it is hard to get Member States to move beyond their national priorities, resulting in the EES being a weak governance tool.
The aim of our article is to examine the future prospects of the European Social Model (ESM). First, the article defines the ESM as a mixture of hard law, soft law and underlying norms and values. Second, the article analyses the ESM on a more detailed level in the case of the law of equal opportunities and employment through a historical account and the legal dynamics of integration. The results of the analysis indicate a growing integration capacity of the ESM. Yet, this runs counter to the current neoliberal preferences of the Barroso Commission which has moved from a strategy of combining economic growth and social cohesion, to one in which economic growth creates social cohesion.
The responsibility of multinational enterprises to respect labour rights in global operations has been widely discussed in the corporate social responsibility and business ethics literature. In recent years, legal scholars have tried to formalize this discussion around the legal concepts of corporate due diligence and corporate liability. This contribution outlines these legal trends. It presents the relevant transnational case law and provides some ideas for interdisciplinary research on multinational enterprises and labour rights.
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