Despite a spectacular economic reaction to the pandemic crisis, which stands in stark contrast to the austerity-driven response to the 2008 financial and economic crisis, Bart Vanhercke and the co-authors of Bilan Social express concerns about the so-called ‘social affairs players’ being sidelined in the new Recovery and Resilience Facility,  the fuzzy EU commitment to gender issues, the EU response to rising in-work poverty and the setting a new social-ecological contract.

The pandemic's longer-term economic consequences are not clear at this stage. No one can exclude that a real social crisis will quickly follow the vaccination campaign in the headlines. For the time being, however, it’s the unprecedented –and unexpected coordinated response by the EU’s and its 27 Members States and the European Commission that stands out. The EU’s response indeed contributed to mitigate the impact on unemployment (compared to the rest of the world) and demonstrated that the EU can react quickly and forcefully.

The EU Commission has recently released a proposal for a directive on equal pay. Kalina Arabadjieva will unpack the flaws of such a proposal and spell out why women are still, on average, paid less than men.

In this episode, Romuald Jagodzinsk, points out the main takeaways of the 20th-anniversary issue of Benchmarking Working Europe. The Covid-19 pandemic, and the ensuing economic recession, has proved to be the harshest of ‘stress tests’ for the European Union, probing policymakers’ ability and willingness to emerge from this new crisis without repeating the mistakes of the past.

In this episode, Sotiria Theodoropoulou sheds light on the economic developments in Europe since the onset of possibly the deepest recession in European history.  The analysis will contextualize the economic and social challenges of member states and provide a preliminary analysis of the autumn package and the economic policy priorities of the EU.

In this episode, Paula Franklin, Senior Researcher at the ETUI will shed light on how the Covid-19 has heightened and amplified the pre-existing cracks in the healthcare sector, imposing difficult working conditions for (female) health workers.

In this episode, the ETUI's new Research Director, Nicola Countouris, sheds light on the importance of research for strengthening the trade union movement, the short term and long term goals for the Institute's research department, and provides insights on how the pandemic has hit the EU labour markets after decades of deregulation and austerity.

At the end of April 2020, in the EU27 there were more than 42 million applications for support for workers on short-time work or similar schemes. This corresponds to almost 27 percent of all employees. If one includes the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the number of applications for short-time work rises to more than 50 million. 

Dr. Torsten Müller of ETUI and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Schulten, head of the WSI collective agreements archive talk about their recent study on "Ensuring fair Short-Time Work - a European overview" in a conversation with Elisa Bruno of the ETUI.  

More info: https://www.etui.org/Publications2/Policy-Briefs/European-Economic-Employment-and-Social-Policy/Ensuring-fair-Short-Time-Work-a-European-overview

In this episode we look at the struggle of platform workers during the COVID19 pandemic with Jan Drahokoupil, senior researcher at the ETUI. From the issue of health and safety at the workplace to the recent strikes in the Amazon factories in the US and in Europe, Jan talks us through what the EU is doing in this field.  

Before the Covid19 crisis: estimates on the extent of platform work (according to ETUI) found that a significant share of the population in Europe has some experience with platform work, but it probably did not exceed 20% of adults by 2019 (https://www.etui.org/Publications2/Working-Papers/Digital-labour-in-central-and-eastern-Europe-evidence-from-the-ETUI-Internet-and-Platform-Work-Survey).

Finally, Jan talks to us about his role as a Member of the Economic advisory board of the Crisis response team of the Czech government. We get to know what is the Czech Republic doing to fight the crisis and sustain its economy and workers.