The European Trade Union Institute

With 180 000 work-related deaths every year in the European Union and more than 2.5 million worldwide, occupational health is a crucial issue for workers and trade unions. Knowing that, somewhere in the world, a worker dies every 11 seconds because of a lack of proper prevention, you might wonder whether there is any point in campaigning for more employment or better wages if these jobs end up taking workers’ lives. And in more than nine out of ten cases, these deaths are largely invisible, because they result from occupational diseases rather than accidents.

This publication stresses that it is high time for international tax rules to be adjusted in light of the coherent business and tax strategies which multinational enterprises deploy at global level.

This new number of the ‘open’ issue of Transfer contains five articles alongside a sixth, launching a new section of this fourth annual issue of Transfer, entitled ‘EU Policy Debate’. The five articles cover the developments in the industrial relations systems of several European countries, with common features in terms of their analysis read more

Pension policy is not safe from the potentially dramatic consequences of the pandemic. But in terms of pension politics, the pandemic also represents a window of opportunity to rethink the political debate on the future reform agenda.

The present policy brief sheds light on the short- and long-term consequences of Covid-19 for pensions in Europe. The short-term measures have consisted of temporary reduction and/or deferral of social contributions, ad hoc benefits for at-risk elderly, and the provision of additional resources to the social security budget. However, the longer-term effects are projected to be massive both for financial sustainability and social adequacy.

Although there seems to be an open room for social spending to buffer the effects of the crisis, still, pension policies recall old debates regarding the intergenerational clash between younger generations in need of greater financial support and older generations with unsustainable social (and pension) rights.

This book addresses the impact of new technologies, typically discussed under the heading of Industry 4.0. It focuses in particular on the automotive industry which has been at the forefront of introducing new technologies such as industrial robots. It analyses their impact on working conditions and employment as well as on the role of production sites in the value chain.

In 2020,  country-specific recommendations (CSRs) have shifted more markedly in favour of strengthening workers' digital skills and providing adequate social protection. This change of focus has conferred a rather social outlook to the 2020 European Semester cycle. For the first time since the launch of the European Semester process, the social recommendations appear to have been 'emancipated' from the growth rhetoric. The emphasis on the social dimension in the CSRs is, according to Silvia Rainone, likely to be an effect of the EU Commission's reaction to the socioeconomic crisis triggered by Covid-19.

The specific traits of the 2020 CSRs are certainly to be welcomed. However, important aspects such as, inter alia, wages, gender equality, pension systems, the transition from education to the labour market, occupational safety and health, and child poverty seem to have fallen off the radar. The effectiveness of such recommendations will need to be carefully assessed over the coming months.

The aim of this working paper is to provide a preliminary assessment of whether the European Green Deal constitutes a suitable policy framework to combine environmental and economic objectives with the pursuit of social fairness, thus ensuring a just transition towards more sustainable economies and societies. Such an assessment appears particularly relevant in a period in which the EU and its Member States are figuring out how to redesign their economies and societies in order to cope with the unprecedented social and economic crisis triggered by the COVID–19 pandemic.

New Covid-19 impact series Policy Brief on Occupational Safety and Health in the healthcare sector. It is clear that the main focus should be on the prevention of exposure of all health workers to this biological agent. Investment in the care economy is long overdue.

The role of trade unions and social dialogue is key in demonstrating the major differences between coal-based energy generation and the automobile industry. This book presents two faces of a just transition towards a net-zero carbon economy by drawing lessons from these two carbon-intensive sectors. The authors regard just transition not as an abstract concept, but as a real practice in real workplaces. While decarbonisation itself is a common objective, particular transitions take place in work environments that are themselves determined by the state of the capital-labour relationship, with inherent conflicts of interest, during the transition process.

The case studies presented in this book highlight the major differences between these two sectors in the nature and magnitude of the challenge, how transition practices are applied and what role the actors play.