About Thiébaut Weber

Thiébaut Weber is a young trade unionist and former student activist in his native France. He was elected as ETUC Confederal Secretary at the Paris Congress in 2015. His ETUC responsibilities include digitalisation, new forms of work, and online platforms. One of his main priorities is to find trade union solutions to tackle the challenges of new technological developments and the platform economy.

Time For A European Dialogue On The Platform Economy

by Thiébaut Weber on 7th March 2018

Digital platform operators and workers need to talk, seriously. As the platform economy grows it is extending far beyond the well-known names such as Uber and Deliveroo. Yet much of the sector remains an unregulated free-for-all in which workers struggle to earn a decent living. That’s why trade unions want operators to sit down with […]

Trade Unions Are Ready To Tackle The Digital Challenge

by Thiébaut Weber on 31st October 2017

Since award-winning physicist Stephen Hawking first warned that artificial intelligence (AI) could spell the end of humanity, other experts have echoed his cataclysmic forecast. In the meantime, for many workers, the day-to-day impact of digital technologies is much more pedestrian, if sometimes almost as threatening. Yet, alongside the risks, trade unions believe that if managed […]

Youth Guarantee: Europe Needs More Investment In Its Young People

by Thiébaut Weber on 18th October 2016

The European Commission’s decision to maintain the Youth Guarantee, the scheme launched in 2013 to offer every young person a place of education, training or employment within four months of leaving formal education or being out of work, is going in the right direction but too slowly. The Youth Guarantee (YG) needs more funding to […]

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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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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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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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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