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 […]

What makes capital cities the best places to live?

Eurofound’s new analysis of the latest European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) compares quality of life and well-being, quality of society, and quality of public services in Europe’s capitals and major cities with respective national averages. The study not only gives an indication of what perceptions of quality of life is like for the 48 million people that live in capital cities in the EU, but also other major European cities such as Istanbul and Belgrade.

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Social Europe Volume Two

This book brings to you some of the best contributions published on Social Europe over the second half of 2019 in easily accessible ebook and paperback formats. The collection is newly edited with a thematic focus on the rise of populism and also includes in text-form previously unpublished material from Social Europe Podcast. This second volume brings together contributions by Cas Mudde, Dani Rodrik, Peter Verovsek, Branko Milanovic, Sheri Berman, Paul Mason, Bela Galgoczi, Mariana Mazzucato and Ngaire Woods.

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 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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The European minimum wage on the doorstep

The European Commission published a consultation document with a view to take legislative action to establish fair minimum wages in Europe. In this policy brief, the researchers argue for a pragmatic approach of taking the ‘in-work-poverty-wage’ threshold of 60 per cent of the national full-time gross median wage as the reference to assess the adequacy of minimum wages. In countries in which a high proportion of workers earn very low wages, the whole wage structure, and therefore the median wage, is very low; therefore, a minimum wage of 60 per cent of the national median wage may still not be enough to ensure a decent living standard.

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