The year 2006 is the European Year of Workers' Mobility . This article seeks to assess how effective such a designation might be in the context of the problems that currently confront the EU. While it finds that the underlying potential is significant, the reality is that the year has been framed more with political than with social and economic goals to the fore and the result is a disappointment.
Poland's post‐communist economic performance has been generally good. However, for many years, its growth was jobless; it exhibited very high unemployment rates and made little progress towards the targets set for EU Member States and accession countries. Unexpectedly, in 2003, the country's labour market began to exhibit a new dynamism, with employment growing strongly and unemployment tumbling. This apparent improvement coincided with a liberalisation of its Labour Code. Unfortunately, the measures introduced to increase flexibility are at variance with the EU's Fixed‐term Work Directive and will likely need to be modified, which may conceivably reverse the recent developments that form the focus of this article.
A recent theoretical literature explores why individuals join unions which provide only public goods. This paper finds supportive empirical evidence for one such theory. However, the continued significance of certain personal characteristics in the unionization decision suggests that unions also provide attractive, privately appropriable services to their members.
The European Union (EU) aspires to be the most competitive, full employment economy in the world and has set a number of ambitious targets to be met by 2010 in order that it can achieve this goal. At the same time, it is pursuing an enlargement policy that will witness the accession of an increasing number of less developed nations. This article explores some of the tensions that exist between these two goals as these are manifest in labour market indicators and finds the likelihood of meeting the deadline set for success remote.
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