Towards a Socialization of the EU's New Economic Governance Regime? EU Labour Policy Interventions in Germany, Ireland, Italy and Romania (2009–2019)

Abstract

In response to the last recession, the European Union (EU) adopted a new economic governance (NEG) regime. An influential stream of EU social policy literature argues that there has been more emphasis on social objectives in the NEG regime in more recent years. This article shows that this is not the case. It does so through an in‐depth analysis of NEG prescriptions on wage, employment protection and collective bargaining policy in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania between 2009 and 2019. Our main conclusion is that the EU's interventions in these three industrial relations policy areas continue to be dominated by a liberalization agenda that is commodifying labour, albeit to a different degree across the uneven but nonetheless integrated European political economy. This finding is important, as countervailing transnational trade union action is the more likely, the more there is a common threat. Even so, our contextualized analysis also enables us to detect contradictions that could provide European labour movements opportunities to pursue countervailing action.

Time for a paradigm change? Incorporating transnational processes into the analysis of the emerging European health-care system

“…As health services account for a significant part of public expenditure -15.3 per cent on average across the EU in 2016 1 -it is hardly surprising that health services have been targeted by commodifying New Economic Governance prescriptions, namely, those contained in the very constrictive Memoranda of Understanding for states that required bailout funding and in the constraining Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs) issued to states deemed to be running excessive deficits or excessive macroeconomic imbalances. Health services have been targeted not only indirectly through prescriptions on public spending or labour relations (Greer et al, 2016;Jordan et al, 2020), but also directly by prescriptions on their level and organisation (Azzopardi et al, 2015;Stan and Erne, 2019). An in-depth analysis of New Economic Governance prescriptions on health care for Germany, Ireland, Italy and Romania from 2009 to 2019 has shown that most of them stipulated that the costs of health care should be pegged or even reduced, and health services further commodified (Stan and Erne, 2019).…”

The management of the Eurozone in crisis times: Actors, institutions and the case of bailout packages

“…The role of the European Union in the liberalization of labour markets was substantially strengthened with the implementation of a new economic governance regime designed to update the Stability and Growth pact in the new context of the economic crisis (Marginson, 2015; Schmidt, 2016). Labour market policies of EU member states have become subject to multilateral surveillance procedures as a result of several legislative changes: the European Semester (2010), the Six Pack (2011), the Two Pack, and the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (2013) (Erne, 2015; Jordan et al, 2021). In particular, the influence of the EU Commission over the labour market policies of European countries has increased via the issue of yearly country-specific recommendations (CSRs) aimed at countries exhibiting ‘excessive deficits’ and other forms of macroeconomic imbalances.…”

Commission entrepreneurship and EU employment policy – The fate of a former darling

“…Most recently, a number of studies have questioned the socialization turn itself. Among these are a study of 290 of EU's CSRs in all member states 2011(Copeland and Daly, 2018 and an in-depth study of IR-related CSR in four EU member states (Jordan et al, 2020).…”