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Karin Pettersson

Karin Pettersson is culture editor at Aftonbladet, Scandinavia’s biggest daily newspaper. She founded Fokus, Sweden’s leading news magazine, and worked for the Swedish Social Democratic Party. She is a 2017 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard.

Karin Pettersson

Can we change the climate on climate change?

Karin Pettersson 22nd February 2021

Karin Pettersson is impressed by a fictional account of the existential challenge humanity faces.

The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi

Karin Pettersson 16th November 2020

Karin Pettersson argues that far from history ‘ending’ in 1989 it has returned, with a vengeance, due to the very deregulation its trumpeters embraced.

The politics of identity and inclusion

Karin Pettersson 27th July 2020

Karin Pettersson argues that struggles around race and gender are fundamentally about inclusion on an equal footing in the political community.

American traumas

Karin Pettersson 8th June 2020

Karin Pettersson explores the deep faultlines of unexpurgated racism tearing the United States apart.

It’s a virus, and this isn’t a war

Karin Pettersson 28th April 2020

The coronavirus crisis is a social challenge, Karin Pettersson writes, which the formerly secure are now being reminded is hitting the poor hardest.

The corona crisis will define our era

Karin Pettersson 16th March 2020

Karin Pettersson writes that the pandemic has highlighted the frailties of a short-sighted and hyper-individualistic social system.

Five lessons for journalism in the age of rage

Karin Pettersson 25th November 2019

For Karin Pettersson, journalism has never been more challenging—and never more important.

Is it time to ban political advertising on Facebook?

Karin Pettersson 15th October 2019

Karin Pettersson argues that ‘free speech’ is not a licence for politicians relying on rage to lie, and for such lies to be amplified by ‘social media’.

Politics in the age of data

Karin Pettersson 2nd September 2019

Karin Pettersson argues that progressive politics is floundering in the waves generated by Big Data—when it could be shaping the tide.

The trilemma of Big Tech

Karin Pettersson 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?

Karin Pettersson 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

Karin Pettersson 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 […]

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


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Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


WATCH HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


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ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


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