About Kirsty Hughes

Kirsty Hughes is director of the Scottish Centre on European Relations.

An inclusive Green New Deal: the EU must raise its ambition, confidence and determination

by Kirsty Hughes on 30th July 2019

In our ‘Europe2025’ series, Kirsty Hughes argues that a Green New Deal can gel the domestic and neighbourhood policies of the union.

Collective bargaining in Europe

This collection of four volumes charts the development of collective bargaining since the year 2000 in the 28 EU Member States. They document how the institutions of collective bargaining have been removed, fundamentally altered or markedly narrowed in scope in all 28 EU Member States. However, there are also positive examples to be found. Some collective bargaining systems have proven more resilient than others in maintaining multi-employer bargaining arrangements. Based on the evidence presented in the country-focused chapters, the key policy issue addressed in this book is how the reduction of the importance of collective bargaining as a tool to jointly regulate the employment relationship can be reversed.

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Role of public services in integrating refugees and asylum seekers

Following the influx of over three million asylum seekers into the European Union in the three-year period 2015–2017, Member States faced a number of challenges related to integrating the newly arrived into their country. This report explores the role of public services – specifically housing, social services, health and education services – in the social and economic integration of refugees and asylum seekers. It aims to identify the factors that hinder this process and the elements that contribute to successful integration.

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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.

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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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About Kirsty Hughes

An inclusive Green New Deal: the EU must raise its ambition, confidence and determination

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