European employment regulation has been repeatedly identified by policymakers as too stringent resulting in policy recommendations aimed at a more flexible labour market. This diagnosis has been reaffirmed, particularly by international policymakers, in the post-2008 economic and jobs crisis with... Find out more

This policy brief considers the impact of online platforms on labour markets and on the employment relationship in particular. It discusses the importance of outsourcing platforms, arguing that the ‘collaborative economy’ used by the European Commission (EC) is a misleading concept, as the trend is... Find out more

This Working Paper critically analyses Italy’s labour market reforms of 2012 (Fornero Reform). It focuses especially on a measure designed to cut unemployment and labour-market dualism by reducing the protection against dismissal enjoyed by permanent employees. The main argument of this paper is... Find out more

The report Benchmarking Working Europe 2014 reviews the crisis and EU austerity policies in the last five years from the point of view of Europe's social agenda. The publication, written by the research team of the ETUI, offers an overview of the most important statistics on the EU’s macroeconomic... Find out more

The third ETUI Policy Brief European Economic and Employment Policy in 2010 analyses the performance of European countries in the crisis according to their levels of flexibility and security. To this end, the author, Andranik Tangian, of the Institute for Social Research at the Hans-Böckler... Find out more

This paper written by Andranik Tangian from the Institute for Economic and Social Research at the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung presents a macroeconomic analysis of flexicurity with regard to the current economic crisis. The analysis is performed with four composite indicators based on statistical figures... Find out more

Over the last few years, ‘flexicurity’ has become a core concept in the European labour market debate. The concept has been widely discussed as a possible new approach to improving labour market performance and combining economic and social objectives. This working paper argues that flexicurity has... Find out more

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‘Flexicurity’ has become one of the more fashionable elements of the European political discourse addressing social and economic policies in general and employment and labour market policies in particular. The European Commission is strongly pushing for flexicurity as the answer to Europe’s... Find out more

EMPHASIS SHOULD BE PUT ON JOB QUALITY European labour markets face a range of significant challenges for which the current institutional and political answers are at the cost of the quality of jobs, quality of employment opportunities and workers' rights. Benchmarking Working Europe 2007 shows how... Find out more