About Esther Lynch

Esther Lynch was elected as ETUC Confederal Secretary at the Paris Congress in 2015. She has extensive experience of the trade union movement both in Ireland and at European and international level. Before joining the ETUC, she was the legislation and social affairs officer of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

Tackling insecure work in Europe—a critical moment

by Esther Lynch on 16th January 2019

The good news is that employment in the EU is at a record high. The bad news is that so much of it is insecure work—and a directive currently in train needs to be tough enough to fix that. Europe has a growing crisis of insecure work. Just before Christmas, the European Commission triumphantly announced that […]

Trade Unions On Frontline In Battle Against Inequality

by Esther Lynch on 21st December 2017

The European Commission continues to talk about robust recovery, but with wages falling or stagnating, many people in Europe are worse off than they were a decade ago. The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions has recently reported that more than half the population in 11 EU Member States has difficulty […]

If Europe Takes Trade Union Rights For Granted… We Risk Losing Them

by Esther Lynch on 9th May 2016

Why, in 2016, has the European Trade Union Confederation found it necessary to start ringing alarm bells in defence of basic trade union rights in the EU? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, agreed in 1948 as a reaction to the horrors of the Second World War, states: “Everyone has the right to form and […]

Sustainable Equality Report. Well-being for everyone in a sustainable Europe

Our societies are in the midst of political, economic, social and ecological crises, which permanently feed into each other, and already undermine democracy. Progressive politics with a common and strong vision are crucially needed. Ahead of the next European elections, the Sustainable Equality Report championed by the S&D Group through its Progressive Society initiative addresses this need, resulting in more than 100 concrete policy proposals by thirty policy-makers and renowned experts.

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Work in the platform economy

This paper presents a case study of the food delivery platform, Deliveroo, in Belgium in 2016-2018. The case offers insights on the nature of platform work, the workers who perform it, the preferences of workers, the strategy of the platforms, and the role of local regulations. Interestingly, Deliveroo in Belgium employed workers through an intermediary, SMart, and we also observed the termination of their co-operation in the period under analysis. Using administrative data provided by SMart and a survey of workers, we analyse patterns of work and also focus on pay.

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Zygmunt Bauman was a towering intellectual who saw and analysed – right up to his death in early 2017 – the great socio-political changes, often convulsive, in modern western society long before his peers. Here we highlight his prescient insights into what he dubbed ‘liquid modernity’ with 24 chapters on topics ranging from online loneliness via precarity/poverty/inequality to migration, fear of the ‘Other’ and the decline of the nation state. Chronicle of Crisis, 2011-16, written by one of the great chroniclers of our times, will be read and re-read for decades and more to come.

The Positive Economic Impact Of Germany's Statutory Minimum Wage

With the empirical analyses of the macroeconomic effects of the introduction of the statutory minimum wage in Germany, the IMK tries to determine the short-term and expected medium- to long-term growth, price and employment effects with the help of a macro-econometric model. As a result, economic growth tended to be stimulated by the introduction of the minimum wage. This was mainly due to the higher wages of the minimum wage beneficiaries and a spillover effect on adjoining wage groups. In particular, this benefited people whose low savings rate led to a particularly strong increase in real private consumption. The price increases triggered were negligible on a macroeconomic scale.

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Societal change and trust in institutions

Overall trust in institutions such as national governments, the legal system, the EU, and the media has rebounded in Europe following the recent economic recovery – showing that the ‘crisis of trust’ in European societies following the Great Recession was largely temporary. However, in a number of the Member States most adversely impacted by the crisis, trust in national institutions has still not returned to pre-crisis levels. This new report details the different factors in maintaining and developing trust in institutions in Europe, including the important role of improving the quality of public services.

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