About Susanne Wixforth and Lukas Hochscheidt

Susanne Wixforth is head of unit in the Europe and International Department of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB). Lukas Hochscheidt is a research assistant there.

How the European Court of Justice could become the guardian of social rights

by Susanne Wixforth and Lukas Hochscheidt on 4th November 2019

The privileging of economic freedoms over social rights by the European Court of Justice could be reversed by a thorough harmonisation of European social law.

Platform work: Maximising the potential while safeguarding standards?

The rise of platform work across the European Union can facilitate better access to the labour market for disadvantaged groups, encourage participation among those with other responsibilities and foster self-employment and entrepreneurship. However, there are growing concerns relating to platform workers’ social protection, working time and health and safety standards, with the work itself often characterised by low income, low-skilled work, and individual small-scale tasks. Eurofound’s new policy brief highlights the main opportunities and challenges of specific types of platform work and illustrates some of the first attempts at addressing them in the EU.

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At the beginning of the new EU legislative cycle, this occasional paper by Udo Bullmann (MEP and S&D Group coordinator in the European Parliament’s Development Committee) makes the case for an EU development policy that puts the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a concern for human well-being front and centre. The paper argues that EU development policy must serve to fight inequalities in partner countries to enable successful transformations in the spirit of the SDGs. Weaving a concern for achieving greater equality into the process of EU development policy-making, including through ex-ante assessment tools, is key in this regard.

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The Blocked Completion of the European Monetary Union

The reform of the euro zone is stuck. Against the background of political blockades, this report examines from a combined economic and political science perspective how the Euro can be prepared for the next crisis. The report first identifies general requirements for the stabilization of economic and monetary union. Next, the report reconstructs the political logic of the euro crisis and shows that the prospects for realizing far-reaching reform proposals aiming at a fiscal union are poor. Subsequently, the report develops a proposal of how, under the given circumstances, the room for maneuver within the existing framework of economic and monetary union can be extended in a pragmatic way in order to strengthen national fiscal policy as an instrument of macroeconomic stabilization.

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How the European Court of Justice could become the guardian of social rights

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