Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research最新文献

{"title":"From one crisis to another: changes in the governance of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)","authors":"P. Pochet","doi":"10.1177/10242589221084582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221084582","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the evolution of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in the aftermath of COVID-19 and compares the current crisis with the previous one (the financial crisis of 2008–2013). It does so by looking at the way interests, ideas and institutions have evolved over the last decade. It looks at the possible changes in European economic governance in the light of three different models of European integration. The goal is not only to describe the differences between the two periods of crisis but also to understand the amplitude of those changes. In the actor-centred ‘institutionalism’ approach of this article, particular attention is paid to conflicts and tensions including inside the EU institutions. This allow for the elements of continuity and rupture to be highlighted and for speculation on the possibility of a new paradigm emerging.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":"38 1","pages":"119 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76711431","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}

{"title":"The wages of reconstruction – the EU’s new budget and the public service staff shortage crisis on the EU’s eastern periphery","authors":"I. Szabó","doi":"10.1177/10242589221094237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221094237","url":null,"abstract":"Over the next seven years, €724bn are being made available to Member States from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) as part of the Next Generation EU budget instrument. Despite being touted as a revolutionary shift in EU economic policies, the RRF in many respects builds on the logic of previous EU budget rounds. Most importantly, it follows a developmental logic aiming to facilitate territorial cohesion by allocating more funds to less developed EU countries and regions. One of the main purposes of EU budgets has long been to strengthen EU cohesion by reducing territorial inequalities. At the time of their accession in 2004 and 2007, the relative underdevelopment of Central and Eastern European (CEE) Member States qualified them for a larger share of the cohesion and regional funds. Over time, the importance of EU funds in these economies has further increased, in parallel with the shrinking of their fiscal space, in itself partly due to enhanced budgetary surveillance by the EU’s New Economic Governance regime (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019; Erne, 2018). The RRF has brought a slight readjustment to the distribution of funds across EU peripheries, with southern Member States gaining greater funding as they now have higher unemployment than eastern Member States and were more severely hit by the economic fallout of the pandemic. Even so, Central and Eastern Europe will receive large amounts of EU RRF funds. Given the continued importance of EU funds for the CEE region and the fact that it has been the main net recipient of past EU budgets, this article explores the impact of previous EU budgets on the region and whether the Recovery and Resilience Facility represents a break with earlier spending priorities. In particular, it focuses on the question of whether the balance of EU funding remains tilted towards infrastructure spending rather than spending on people (human resources). To start with, CEE countries have been successful in absorbing EU funds, meaning they have the capacity to spend a very high share of the available funds. Despite worries before their accession, the absorption capacity of the eastern EU newcomers ramped up very quickly (Medve-Bálint, 2018). This was partly a result of their upgraded bureaucratic apparatus during the accession process and of a re-orientation of their domestic budgetary priorities, as most EU projects require co-financing. While they were successful in spending this money, which areas were targeted? What did these countries spend the money on? One thing is almost certain: the influx of EU money since 1094237 TRS0010.1177/10242589221094237TransferSzabó research-article2022","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":"36 1","pages":"141 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83465358","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}

{"title":"Reflections on the COVID moment and life beyond neoliberalism","authors":"C. Crouch","doi":"10.1177/10242589221078125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221078125","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID pandemic has demonstrated the weakness of neoliberalism by showing the importance of public services, workers’ need for security, and a heightened awareness of collective interdependence. Economic theory recognises the deficiencies of depending on market forces by accepting certain grounds for public intervention, including public and collective goods and negative externalities. Acceptance of the human contribution to climate change has massively increased their importance. The pandemic has had similar effects. The very rich may be able to escape to safe places, but the great mass of us are dependent on the support of each other, often through a mobilisation of resources that only states can organise. While much of the community that was rediscovered during the pandemic was highly local, damage to the climate and the spread of disease cannot be contained within national boundaries; cooperation has to be cross-national. It is therefore incompatible with an obsession with national sovereignty. For Europeans the institutions of the EU are central.","PeriodicalId":23253,"journal":{"name":"Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research","volume":"39 1","pages":"31 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73034046","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}

{"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":"2012 1","pages":"101 - 118"},"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}

{"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":"73 1","pages":"15 - 30"},"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}

{"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":"42 1","pages":"151 - 153"},"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}

{"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":"33 1","pages":"47 - 64"},"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}

{"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":"74 1","pages":"83 - 100"},"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}

{"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":"17 1","pages":"65 - 82"},"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}

{"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":"247 1","pages":"527 - 539"},"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}