Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589221097231
D. Natali
Much of the recent literature on the COVID-19 pandemic agrees on the uniqueness of this crisis. Assessments of the subsequent policy response in Europe diverge, however: while some see signs of policy change, others consider the empirical evidence to be inconclusive or, worse, consistent with a reinforcement of neoliberalism. The present article aims to contribute to that debate by providing a preliminary assessment of policy measures in the areas of health care, employment protection and pensions. Recent measures are viewed in terms of the neoliberal paradigm, which is used as a benchmark to identify any sign of innovation. While it is too early to talk about a true paradigmatic transformation, the evidence collected from international datasets and official documents confirms that ideas and policy measures show signs of change. The article also suggests that the study of ideas is a promising field of enquiry with which to improve our understanding of the pandemic and its effects.
{"title":"COVID-19 and the opportunity to change the neoliberal agenda: evidence from socio-employment policy responses across Europe","authors":"D. Natali","doi":"10.1177/10242589221097231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221097231","url":null,"abstract":"Much of the recent literature on the COVID-19 pandemic agrees on the uniqueness of this crisis. Assessments of the subsequent policy response in Europe diverge, however: while some see signs of policy change, others consider the empirical evidence to be inconclusive or, worse, consistent with a reinforcement of neoliberalism. The present article aims to contribute to that debate by providing a preliminary assessment of policy measures in the areas of health care, employment protection and pensions. Recent measures are viewed in terms of the neoliberal paradigm, which is used as a benchmark to identify any sign of innovation. While it is too early to talk about a true paradigmatic transformation, the evidence collected from international datasets and official documents confirms that ideas and policy measures show signs of change. The article also suggests that the study of ideas is a promising field of enquiry with which to improve our understanding of the pandemic and its effects.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75976572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589221081943
Cornel Ban, Dorothee Bohle, Marek Naczyk
An advocacy coalition of trade unions, churches and NGOs had been trying for a long time to mobilise domestic media and politicians in order to re-regulate the German meat industry. The meat industry’s low-cost business model, using employee posting and subcontracting on a massive scale, has led to extreme forms of unsafe working and poor living conditions for large numbers of Central and Eastern European workers. But it is only in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that the German government decided to ban subcontracting, posting and temporary work in this industry. Why did COVID-19 make a difference? In an industry in which the livelihoods of local communities in Germany’s pig belt and in deprived rural parts of Romania have become structurally dependent on subcontracting, institutional change would not have happened without the pre-existing mobilisation of the above-mentioned advocacy coalition. But COVID-19 created a ‘perfect storm’ that empowered this coalition by helping reframe the meat industry issue away from a ‘narrow’ employment regulation problem into a ‘broader’ public health threat. Indeed, after becoming a virus hotspot, the meat industry was no longer just a threat to the livelihoods of its own workers, but to those of the wider local community.
{"title":"A perfect storm: COVID-19 and the reorganisation of the German meat industry","authors":"Cornel Ban, Dorothee Bohle, Marek Naczyk","doi":"10.1177/10242589221081943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221081943","url":null,"abstract":"An advocacy coalition of trade unions, churches and NGOs had been trying for a long time to mobilise domestic media and politicians in order to re-regulate the German meat industry. The meat industry’s low-cost business model, using employee posting and subcontracting on a massive scale, has led to extreme forms of unsafe working and poor living conditions for large numbers of Central and Eastern European workers. But it is only in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that the German government decided to ban subcontracting, posting and temporary work in this industry. Why did COVID-19 make a difference? In an industry in which the livelihoods of local communities in Germany’s pig belt and in deprived rural parts of Romania have become structurally dependent on subcontracting, institutional change would not have happened without the pre-existing mobilisation of the above-mentioned advocacy coalition. But COVID-19 created a ‘perfect storm’ that empowered this coalition by helping reframe the meat industry issue away from a ‘narrow’ employment regulation problem into a ‘broader’ public health threat. Indeed, after becoming a virus hotspot, the meat industry was no longer just a threat to the livelihoods of its own workers, but to those of the wider local community.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86364412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589221089785
G. Meardi, Arianna Tassinari
The literature on corporatism sees exogenous threats as opportunities for establishing interclass alliances. This article asks if this has been the case with the COVID-19 pandemic, looking at whether social dialogue practices and functions have changed in the three largest EU countries compared with the ‘crisis corporatism’ and ‘austerity corporatism’ that accompanied the Great Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 and the eurozone crisis of 2010–2012. It concludes that continuity prevails in terms of the forms and limitations of concerted solutions, which remain country-specific. However, a crisis focused on health issues has entailed a shift in the agenda from labour costs to production issues, providing trade unions with discursive resources opening up opportunities to move from the concession bargaining of previous decades to more assertive roles.
{"title":"Crisis corporatism 2.0? The role of social dialogue in the pandemic crisis in Europe","authors":"G. Meardi, Arianna Tassinari","doi":"10.1177/10242589221089785","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221089785","url":null,"abstract":"The literature on corporatism sees exogenous threats as opportunities for establishing interclass alliances. This article asks if this has been the case with the COVID-19 pandemic, looking at whether social dialogue practices and functions have changed in the three largest EU countries compared with the ‘crisis corporatism’ and ‘austerity corporatism’ that accompanied the Great Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 and the eurozone crisis of 2010–2012. It concludes that continuity prevails in terms of the forms and limitations of concerted solutions, which remain country-specific. However, a crisis focused on health issues has entailed a shift in the agenda from labour costs to production issues, providing trade unions with discursive resources opening up opportunities to move from the concession bargaining of previous decades to more assertive roles.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90614591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589221099980b
D. Hollanders
Chapter 6 discusses the challenges of developing European-level union responses to immigration. Here the picture that emerges is one of fragmentation, institutional diversity, differential access to resources, and different levels of engagement and political will. Although unions may talk about internationalism, the authors draw attention to the realities of national-level strategies and responses and the resulting difficulties this poses for coordination at the European level. It is here that the work is probably most pessimistic about union prospects. At least, while the impression is that European coordination is desirable, few clues emerge as to how to achieve this. Chapter 7 offers greater hope in considering challenges to solidarity with reference to the ‘logics of action’ triangle. The work draws heavily on Hyman’s (1999) ideas about organic solidarity with all the concomitant challenges and opportunities which this presents. It moves away from institutional path-dependent accounts that cannot account for deviation from the expected. Perhaps more explicit recognition could have been given to the existence of multiple contingent solidarities, but the dynamic nature of representation and representative claims does come across clearly. So too does the idea of the fuzzy boundary between traditional unions and their activities and newly emerging forms of representation (not just unions) and their areas of focus. The book is clearly of interest to an academic audience – students and researchers. It also ought to be of interest to policy-makers, and will certainly find an audience among the European social partners. Policy-makers operating within the EU-level institutional structures would also do well to reflect on the work’s key messages. Trade union officials and activists will also take numerous points from this book, which will allow them to examine and reflect on their own understanding and practice, not only in relation to issues of immigration, but more widely through application of the ‘logics of action’ framework across policy areas. As the work itself notes, the case for representation will be made in implicit or explicit terms to the logics of action and tactics will then follow from the chosen logic(s). There is real value for activists and officials here, enabling them to consider the various possibilities through greater awareness and explicit understanding of what logics of action are being drawn upon. For activists especially, so many of the day-to-day approaches and understandings of unionism have been made familiar by socialisation processes. This book really brings what might be possible into sharp focus.
{"title":"Book review: Unwitting Architect – German Primacy and the Origins of Neoliberalism","authors":"D. Hollanders","doi":"10.1177/10242589221099980b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221099980b","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 6 discusses the challenges of developing European-level union responses to immigration. Here the picture that emerges is one of fragmentation, institutional diversity, differential access to resources, and different levels of engagement and political will. Although unions may talk about internationalism, the authors draw attention to the realities of national-level strategies and responses and the resulting difficulties this poses for coordination at the European level. It is here that the work is probably most pessimistic about union prospects. At least, while the impression is that European coordination is desirable, few clues emerge as to how to achieve this. Chapter 7 offers greater hope in considering challenges to solidarity with reference to the ‘logics of action’ triangle. The work draws heavily on Hyman’s (1999) ideas about organic solidarity with all the concomitant challenges and opportunities which this presents. It moves away from institutional path-dependent accounts that cannot account for deviation from the expected. Perhaps more explicit recognition could have been given to the existence of multiple contingent solidarities, but the dynamic nature of representation and representative claims does come across clearly. So too does the idea of the fuzzy boundary between traditional unions and their activities and newly emerging forms of representation (not just unions) and their areas of focus. The book is clearly of interest to an academic audience – students and researchers. It also ought to be of interest to policy-makers, and will certainly find an audience among the European social partners. Policy-makers operating within the EU-level institutional structures would also do well to reflect on the work’s key messages. Trade union officials and activists will also take numerous points from this book, which will allow them to examine and reflect on their own understanding and practice, not only in relation to issues of immigration, but more widely through application of the ‘logics of action’ framework across policy areas. As the work itself notes, the case for representation will be made in implicit or explicit terms to the logics of action and tactics will then follow from the chosen logic(s). There is real value for activists and officials here, enabling them to consider the various possibilities through greater awareness and explicit understanding of what logics of action are being drawn upon. For activists especially, so many of the day-to-day approaches and understandings of unionism have been made familiar by socialisation processes. This book really brings what might be possible into sharp focus.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76352576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589221079151
B. Ebbinghaus, Lukas Lehner
Europe has been faced with multiple challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the problem of how to secure jobs and earnings. In our comparative analysis, we explore to what degree European welfare states were capable of responding to this crisis by stabilising employment and workers’ incomes. While short-time work was a policy tool already partly used in the 2008/2009 Great Recession, job retention policies were further expanded or newly introduced across Europe in 2020 in the wake of the pandemic. However, cross-national variations persist in the way in which these schemes were designed and implemented across European welfare states, aiming more or less to hoard labour and thereby avoid mass dismissals throughout the employment crisis. We distinguish between business support and labour support logics in explaining the variation in job retention policies across Europe. Our finding is that Continental, Mediterranean and liberal welfare states did more to foster labour hoarding using short-time work than Nordic or Central and Eastern European countries.
{"title":"Cui bono – business or labour? Job retention policies during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe","authors":"B. Ebbinghaus, Lukas Lehner","doi":"10.1177/10242589221079151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221079151","url":null,"abstract":"Europe has been faced with multiple challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the problem of how to secure jobs and earnings. In our comparative analysis, we explore to what degree European welfare states were capable of responding to this crisis by stabilising employment and workers’ incomes. While short-time work was a policy tool already partly used in the 2008/2009 Great Recession, job retention policies were further expanded or newly introduced across Europe in 2020 in the wake of the pandemic. However, cross-national variations persist in the way in which these schemes were designed and implemented across European welfare states, aiming more or less to hoard labour and thereby avoid mass dismissals throughout the employment crisis. We distinguish between business support and labour support logics in explaining the variation in job retention policies across Europe. Our finding is that Continental, Mediterranean and liberal welfare states did more to foster labour hoarding using short-time work than Nordic or Central and Eastern European countries.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73881683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589221080872
E. Pavolini, David Luque Balbona, A. Guillén
This article aims to interpret trade unions’ role in reconciliation policies during the current pandemic in Italy and Spain. Questions to be answered include whether and to what degree unions have been present in the public debate, have participated in the policy-making process, have acted as policy reform protagonists or have consented to it, and to what extent they have been able to influence the direction of reform. The study proposes a three-level analytical framework of general applicability, signalling the variables that may affect the role played by unions at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels, together with the indicators that could be used. Research results for the Italian and Spanish cases indicate that the most relevant level to explain the role played by unions is the macro one. Unions tended to acquiesce to government policies in both countries, although that does not preclude action or involvement. The article also argues that a better and more nuanced categorisation of union roles should be developed.
{"title":"Reconciliation policies in COVID times: what role for trade unions in Spain and Italy?","authors":"E. Pavolini, David Luque Balbona, A. Guillén","doi":"10.1177/10242589221080872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221080872","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to interpret trade unions’ role in reconciliation policies during the current pandemic in Italy and Spain. Questions to be answered include whether and to what degree unions have been present in the public debate, have participated in the policy-making process, have acted as policy reform protagonists or have consented to it, and to what extent they have been able to influence the direction of reform. The study proposes a three-level analytical framework of general applicability, signalling the variables that may affect the role played by unions at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels, together with the indicators that could be used. Research results for the Italian and Spanish cases indicate that the most relevant level to explain the role played by unions is the macro one. Unions tended to acquiesce to government policies in both countries, although that does not preclude action or involvement. The article also argues that a better and more nuanced categorisation of union roles should be developed.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84971227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589211064175
D. Soskice
I would like to start by thanking Martin Höpner for his superb review essay of Democracy and Prosperity, which Torben Iversen and I published at the start of 2019. Martin Höpner’s review essay, published in Transfer 3/2021, is powerfully written and insightful, it covers much ground, it is sympathetic but critical, and it certainly pulls no punches in the critical sections. This piece is not a direct reply to Höpner’s criticisms. I want rather to put our position in a somewhat different – perhaps less bald – way than we did in the book (benefiting from at least three years of reflection, discussion and commentary by others since we sent the draft to the publisher). I would also like to use this essay to sketch out ways in which one might think about extending the argument. A fundamental starting point is Martin Höpner’s perceptive comment that the book is a theory of advanced capitalism, not a development of our intellectual background in essentially static varieties of capitalism. As a theory of advanced capitalism our approach is Schumpeterian, dynamic and historical, rooted in changing technological regimes and hence also potentially unstable over long periods. We regard governments of advanced capitalist states as critical to successful technological regime-change and to innovation. By contrast with Marxist approaches, the driver of advanced capitalist democracies is government responsiveness to conflicts between progressive, aspirational and more highly educated and skilled forces in the electorate and conservative, reactionary and populist forces. We theorise why we believe that progressive democratic forces win out over the long run in a technological regime – here in the putative future Polanyian second movement discussed below, as graduate jobs and graduates become an increasingly large proportion of the workforce (and as in the Fordist regime throughout the Trentes Glorieuses an increasingly large proportion of the workforce had well-rewarded unionised employment). But the ICT revolution also sharply increased market income inequality, as Piketty has notably pointed out (Piketty, 2014). It has been widely assumed that democratic governments are unable or unwilling to correct this through redistribution. This (as it turns out largely wrong) assumption has been justified by appeal to the political power of advanced capitalism or the wealthy, or to the
{"title":"Transformations of advanced capitalist democracies in the digital era","authors":"D. Soskice","doi":"10.1177/10242589211064175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589211064175","url":null,"abstract":"I would like to start by thanking Martin Höpner for his superb review essay of Democracy and Prosperity, which Torben Iversen and I published at the start of 2019. Martin Höpner’s review essay, published in Transfer 3/2021, is powerfully written and insightful, it covers much ground, it is sympathetic but critical, and it certainly pulls no punches in the critical sections. This piece is not a direct reply to Höpner’s criticisms. I want rather to put our position in a somewhat different – perhaps less bald – way than we did in the book (benefiting from at least three years of reflection, discussion and commentary by others since we sent the draft to the publisher). I would also like to use this essay to sketch out ways in which one might think about extending the argument. A fundamental starting point is Martin Höpner’s perceptive comment that the book is a theory of advanced capitalism, not a development of our intellectual background in essentially static varieties of capitalism. As a theory of advanced capitalism our approach is Schumpeterian, dynamic and historical, rooted in changing technological regimes and hence also potentially unstable over long periods. We regard governments of advanced capitalist states as critical to successful technological regime-change and to innovation. By contrast with Marxist approaches, the driver of advanced capitalist democracies is government responsiveness to conflicts between progressive, aspirational and more highly educated and skilled forces in the electorate and conservative, reactionary and populist forces. We theorise why we believe that progressive democratic forces win out over the long run in a technological regime – here in the putative future Polanyian second movement discussed below, as graduate jobs and graduates become an increasingly large proportion of the workforce (and as in the Fordist regime throughout the Trentes Glorieuses an increasingly large proportion of the workforce had well-rewarded unionised employment). But the ICT revolution also sharply increased market income inequality, as Piketty has notably pointed out (Piketty, 2014). It has been widely assumed that democratic governments are unable or unwilling to correct this through redistribution. This (as it turns out largely wrong) assumption has been justified by appeal to the political power of advanced capitalism or the wealthy, or to the","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76976290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589211061068a
Thomas Klikauer, Nadine Campbell
floods or forest fires have shown the limits of small states. For example, the EU has long since set the course for mobile phone broadcast warning systems for direct notification of those affected, of the kind that have long existed in the USA, China and Japan, and are being introduced in France, Italy and Great Britain, while in Germany there is talk of reintroducing sirens. Streeck ignores the fact that some European course-setting can be helpful, whereas a traditional small state such as Belgium remained at the same level of unpreparedness as Germany in the face of the floods. No one seems properly prepared for regularly recurring fires. His alternative concept of a united but not unified Europe, however, suffers from a lack of institutional anchoring and thus follows a German tradition of building castles in the air. The small states would coexist peacefully and harmoniously, he postulates, so that the question seems justified whether there would be any international relations at all. In parallel, he pleads for a Europe of variable geometry or à la carte (p. 390). It can be assumed from this that the KeynesPolanyi state is incompatible with many building blocks of the EU, such as membership of the monetary union with fixed debt and budget deficit limits, and prohibition of capital controls, internal as well as external. In order to implement the desired changes in the EU, not only would considerably higher transfer sums be necessary, but nothing less than an abolition of the Fiscal Pact, the ‘debt brake’ and the ban on capital controls, together with a revival of industrial policy with the possibility of subsidies, the enforcement of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, an increase in the size of the public sector, and crisis resistance and resilience. In this context, why the editors left in footnotes on dumplings and pasta remains unfathomable. It is not least to Streeck’s credit that he has brought blasphemous questions about the EU back into the culture of rational discourse. In any case, pro-Europeans have to answer a few tricky questions that go to the heart of the matter, including many neoliberal ingredients. Why is it that in the USA a state like California can introduce stricter emissions standards, while in the EU it is impossible for a Member State to do the same? Is the EU therefore more neoliberal than the USA or at least the EU internal market more neoliberal than the US internal market? Why do minimum standards in the EU necessarily have to be maximum standards at the same time? In the USA, the car industry quickly adapted to the Californian standards instead of producing different types of cars in each case; in Europe, no one is allowed to lead the way: can Europe still afford this ideological narrow-mindedness in times of accelerated climate change?
洪水或森林火灾显示了小州的局限性。例如，欧盟早就制定了直接通知受影响人群的手机广播警报系统的路线，这种系统早已在美国、中国和日本存在，并正在法国、意大利和英国引入，而在德国，人们正在谈论重新引入警报器。施特雷克忽略了这样一个事实，即一些欧洲的路线设定可能是有帮助的，而像比利时这样的传统小国在面对洪水时仍然处于与德国相同的准备不足的水平。似乎没有人对定期发生的火灾做好充分准备。然而，他的另一种概念——一个统一但不统一的欧洲——却缺乏制度上的支撑，因此沿袭了德国的空中楼阁传统。他假设，小国将和平和谐地共存，因此，是否存在任何国际关系的问题似乎是合理的。与此同时，他呼吁建立一个可变几何的欧洲，或称“ la carte”(第390页)。由此可以假设，凯恩斯-波兰尼国家与欧盟的许多组成部分是不相容的，比如拥有固定债务和预算赤字限制的货币联盟成员国身份，以及禁止内部和外部资本管制。为了在欧盟实现预期的变化，不仅需要相当高的转移支付金额，而且还需要废除《财政公约》、“债务刹车”和禁止资本管制，同时恢复可能提供补贴的产业政策，执行“污染者付费”原则，增加公共部门的规模，以及抗危机能力和复原力。在这种背景下，为什么编辑在脚注中留下饺子和意大利面仍然是令人费解的。施特雷克将有关欧盟的亵渎神明的问题带回了理性话语的文化中，这一点尤其值得赞扬。无论如何，亲欧派必须回答几个触及问题核心的棘手问题，其中包括许多新自由主义成分。为什么在美国，像加利福尼亚这样的州可以引入更严格的排放标准，而在欧盟，一个成员国却不可能这样做?因此，欧盟是否比美国更新自由主义，或者至少欧盟内部市场比美国内部市场更新自由主义?为什么欧盟的最低标准必须同时是最高标准?在美国，汽车工业很快就适应了加州的标准，而不是在每种情况下生产不同类型的汽车;在欧洲，没有人被允许带头:在气候变化加速的时代，欧洲还能承受这种意识形态上的狭隘吗?
{"title":"Book Review: Organizing Matters – Two Logics of Trade Union Representation","authors":"Thomas Klikauer, Nadine Campbell","doi":"10.1177/10242589211061068a","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589211061068a","url":null,"abstract":"floods or forest fires have shown the limits of small states. For example, the EU has long since set the course for mobile phone broadcast warning systems for direct notification of those affected, of the kind that have long existed in the USA, China and Japan, and are being introduced in France, Italy and Great Britain, while in Germany there is talk of reintroducing sirens. Streeck ignores the fact that some European course-setting can be helpful, whereas a traditional small state such as Belgium remained at the same level of unpreparedness as Germany in the face of the floods. No one seems properly prepared for regularly recurring fires. His alternative concept of a united but not unified Europe, however, suffers from a lack of institutional anchoring and thus follows a German tradition of building castles in the air. The small states would coexist peacefully and harmoniously, he postulates, so that the question seems justified whether there would be any international relations at all. In parallel, he pleads for a Europe of variable geometry or à la carte (p. 390). It can be assumed from this that the KeynesPolanyi state is incompatible with many building blocks of the EU, such as membership of the monetary union with fixed debt and budget deficit limits, and prohibition of capital controls, internal as well as external. In order to implement the desired changes in the EU, not only would considerably higher transfer sums be necessary, but nothing less than an abolition of the Fiscal Pact, the ‘debt brake’ and the ban on capital controls, together with a revival of industrial policy with the possibility of subsidies, the enforcement of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, an increase in the size of the public sector, and crisis resistance and resilience. In this context, why the editors left in footnotes on dumplings and pasta remains unfathomable. It is not least to Streeck’s credit that he has brought blasphemous questions about the EU back into the culture of rational discourse. In any case, pro-Europeans have to answer a few tricky questions that go to the heart of the matter, including many neoliberal ingredients. Why is it that in the USA a state like California can introduce stricter emissions standards, while in the EU it is impossible for a Member State to do the same? Is the EU therefore more neoliberal than the USA or at least the EU internal market more neoliberal than the US internal market? Why do minimum standards in the EU necessarily have to be maximum standards at the same time? In the USA, the car industry quickly adapted to the Californian standards instead of producing different types of cars in each case; in Europe, no one is allowed to lead the way: can Europe still afford this ideological narrow-mindedness in times of accelerated climate change?","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85810555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589211061081
M. Ferrera
The sequence of crises in the 2010s entirely changed the socio-economic context that had inspired the Lisbon strategy in the year 2000. EU policy veered towards austerity and social policy became an ‘adjustment variable’. Since the mid-2010s, however, a slow process of rebalancing has gained ground, culminating in the adoption of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) in 2017. The Porto Summit has confirmed the centrality of the Pillar for a new Social Europe. To appreciate fully the EPSR’s potential, it is necessary to focus not only on binding measures but also on EU incentives and actions aimed at promoting (and partially funding) concrete access to social rights. Especially through the ‘guarantee’ instrument, the EU can play a bigger and more effective role in the sphere of social citizenship, without stumbling into the political obstacles associated with hard law.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1177/10242589211061083
P. Pochet
This article argues that the political landscape at the national level is an important element in the development and failures of European social policy. Our understanding of the European social dimension cannot be limited to the various interests of groups of bureaucrats or the goodwill of the Commission (or some of its members). It must take into account the bigger picture of the evolution of national electorates and the place of social issues in national and European elections, which in turn impacts the political balance in the EU institutions. National politics resound at European and transnational level in different global projects (to name the major ones: neoliberal, neomercantilist, social democrat and now green) (Van Apeldoorn and Horn, 2019. Bulmer and Joseph, 2016). However, this article will not explore how these EU/global transnational hegemonic projects are developing and interacting. This article demonstrates the complex impact, shaped by many factors, of the political left/right balance on developments in EU social policy and integration over the past 20 years. Almost 25 years ago, the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) unwittingly initiated a new stage in European social policy. At the time, attention was focused on the new (social) changes that were being made to the Treaty of Maastricht, which had launched the risky and unstable venture of the single currency without prior political union. This was also the year of political victory for two, albeit very different, parties of the European Left: the French Socialist Party of Lionel Jospin and Tony Blair’s New Labour in the United Kingdom. It marked the beginning of a brief period of domination of centre-left governments in the European political landscape, between 1997 and 2004 (Manow et al., 2004; Pochet, 2019) but without a fully shared vision on how to develop a Social Europe project.
本文认为，国家层面的政治格局是欧洲社会政策发展和失败的一个重要因素。我们对欧洲社会层面的理解不能局限于官僚集团的各种利益或欧盟委员会(或其某些成员)的善意。它必须考虑到国家选民演变的更大图景，以及国家和欧洲选举中社会问题的地位，这反过来又影响欧盟机构的政治平衡。国家政治在欧洲和跨国层面上在不同的全球项目中回响(举几个主要的例子:新自由主义、新重商主义、社会民主主义和现在的绿色)(Van Apeldoorn和Horn, 2019年)。Bulmer and Joseph, 2016)。然而，本文将不探讨这些欧盟/全球跨国霸权项目是如何发展和相互作用的。这篇文章展示了在过去的20年里，政治上的左右平衡对欧盟社会政策和一体化发展的复杂影响，受到许多因素的影响。大约25年前，《阿姆斯特丹条约》(1997)在不知不觉中开启了欧洲社会政策的一个新阶段。当时，人们的注意力集中在《马斯特里赫特条约》(Treaty of Maastricht)正在发生的新的(社会)变化上，该条约在没有事先建立政治联盟的情况下启动了冒险而不稳定的单一货币。今年也是欧洲左翼的两个政党(尽管非常不同)取得政治胜利的一年:莱昂内尔•若斯潘(Lionel Jospin)领导的法国社会党和托尼•布莱尔(Tony Blair)领导的英国新工党。它标志着1997年至2004年间中左翼政府在欧洲政治格局中短暂统治时期的开始(Manow et al.， 2004;Pochet, 2019)，但在如何发展社会欧洲项目方面没有完全共同的愿景。
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