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 […]

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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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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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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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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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.