The European Trade Union Institute

Meaningful involvement of domestic stakeholders in the implementation of the national Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRPs) is key to ensuring the legitimacy of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

This policy brief investigates national trade unions’ involvement in the implementation of the RRPs in seven EU countries: Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia and Spain.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Council agreed to provide major financial support to Member States. Drawing on a combination of the EU’s long-term budget (2021–2027) and an additional temporary support system known as ‘NextGenerationEU’ (NGEU), the EU has been providing funds to help Member States with the fall-out from the Covid-19 crisis. 

To access the RRF funds, Member States submitted detailed national Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRPs), in which they set out reforms and investments to be completed by 2026.

On 11 April 2023 the European Council adopted the Pay Transparency Directive. This was preceded by a long campaign by the ETUC and trade unions across Europe calling for greater pay transparency to address the underlying and structural causes of the gender pay gap and a strong role for trade unions and collective bargaining in ending pay inequalities between women and men.

While labour flows within the EU are substantial and growing, relatively little is known about what drives them or what conditions mobile workers face. This working paper describes the flows of working-age movers between EU Member States, addressing the question of who decides to move and whether these moves follow similar push and pull factors to migration more generally. Besides investigating why EU citizens move between countries, we also describe their initial labour market outcomes at the destination, which is important in considering the benefit of such moves. Our analyses indicate substantial variation in labour market outcomes. As with other migration, mobility within Europe is usually associated with relatively worse labour market opportunities in the labour market compared to the majority. There is strong variation between movers depending on region within the EU, however. This paper also compares the situation of recent movers to those who stay in their countries of origin, finding large differences between countries in the selection of movers.

The twin digital and green transition will have far-reaching labour market consequences in the manufacturing sector as regards the quantity, character and quality of employment. The effects of transition will be uneven between countries and regions, different industries and different categories of workers, depending on their various socio-economic starting points and the different degrees to which they are affected by the twin transition. 

This paper presents the latest results of the European Job Quality Index, updated with 2021 data, and compares the relative performance of EU countries on the Index over time. 

Work-related psychosocial exposures are a major occupational hazard in European countries. They are highly prevalent, as shown in several studies based on the data from the European Working Conditions Surveys (Malard et al. 2013; Niedhammer et al. 2012). A large number of epidemiological studies have shown that psychosocial work exposures are associated with various health outcomes, especially cardiovascular diseases (Niedhammer et al. 2021) and mental disorders (Niedhammer et al. 2021). The etiological role of these exposures in these health outcomes has therefore been investigated in the literature and the scientific evidence is convincing.

This report provides an overview of the ways in which EU and EEA Member States have regulated the immigration of third-country nationals who enter their territory for the purpose of work. Its focus is on short-term migrant workers and it presents the results of an extensive mapping exercise carried out by national experts from 23 EU and two EEA countries in collaboration with the ETUI.

This edited volume explores the need for a transformative approach to envisioning a just social and economic model. A cross-disciplinary team of academic experts was formed to develop this approach, with the aim of proposing concrete policy ideas that are both transformative and original. While these ideas should not be contingent on a revolutionary reconfiguration of the current relationship between capital and labour, they may lead to a radical rebalancing of power structures within societies.