About Karin Pettersson

Karin Pettersson is director of public policy at Schibsted Media Group and chair of WAN-IFRA Media Freedom Board. She is a 2017 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard. Formerly she was political editor-in-chief at Aftonbladet, Scandinavia’s biggest daily newspaper. She founded Fokus, Sweden's leading news magazine, and worked for the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

The trilemma of Big Tech

by Karin Pettersson on 7th May 2019

Karin Pettersson says we can have Big Tech’s market domination, business models and democracy—just not all at the same time.

Can data-labour unions break the monopoly capture of data?

by Karin Pettersson on 1st April 2019

Karin Pettersson begins a series of Social Europe columns by arguing it’s time to rethink ‘free’ data as the product of labour. Recently I attended a seminar in Stockholm on the Future of Work, hosted by a major trade union. A representative from Google was present and asked the seemingly sweet and constructive question: what […]

Without Social Democracy, Capitalism Will Eat Itself

by Karin Pettersson on 10th February 2017

It’s a tragedy but there’s no way around it: At a time when it is most needed, social democracy is at an historic low point. What are progressives to do? Here are four lessons for the future that the Left needs to understand, and four ways to think about the road ahead. How the world has […]

Time for substantial minimum wage rises and a European minimum wage policy

Minimum wages in most European Union (EU) countries were increased at the start of 2019, with an median increase of 4.8 % compared with the previous year, continuing the recent trends towards faster minimum wage growth. Much of this is accounted for by substantial increases in Eastern Europe together with efforts to undertake permanent and structural increases in minimum wage levels in countries such as Spain. There is also a growing debate over the role of minimum wages for the concept of Social Europe, which is expected to play a significant role in the 2019 European Parliament elections. In this context, the German government has indicated that one of its priorities during its EU Council Presidency in the second half of 2020 will be elaborating a framework for a European minimum wage policy.

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A New Analytical Approach Towards Sustainable Development

Co-sponsored by the S&D through its Progressive Society Initiative, the Independent Annual Sustainable Economy Survey is an alternative vision of the Commission's Annual Growth Survey. In addition to its usual in-depth analyses of economic and social developments in Europe, the new iASES broadens its scope and addresses environmental sustainability. To this end, it provides the first ever evaluation of Europe's ‘climate debt’, i.e. a computation of the investments needed for EU Member States to achieve the climate targets set out in the COP 21 agreement.

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Living and working in Europe 2015-2018

Living and working in Europe 2015–2018 brings together some of Eurofound’s main research findings on the living and working conditions of people in Europe over the last four years, during the term of the outgoing European Parliament and Commission. This work has answered key questions about aspects of life and work that matter keenly to people and policymakers alike, highlighting where policymaking needs to be targeted if it is to deliver for citizens. View the interactive page and download the report.

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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.

Convergence to fair wage growth? Evidence from European countries on the link between productivity and real compensation growth, 1970–2017

This Working Paper addresses the issue of ‘fair’ wage growth over the last few decades. It assesses whether growth in real compensation is systematically associated with labour productivity growth and, if so, whether the two have ‘decoupled’ in recent years. The paper examines country-specific evidence from 25 Member States and finds evidence for a widening of the wage-productivity gap in the 1970s and 1980s which has only been partially closed in recent years.

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