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 7 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 31 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 18 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 […]

New Social Europe Book

Is an unconditional basic income without means-test or work-test compatible with social justice and individual self-worth? Does it open up the space for an end to demeaning labour and a resurgence of voluntary work and cultural life? Is it affordable? This collection of short but compelling essays, all previously published in Social Europe, allows both proponents and opponents to make their case and is designed to extend this vital discussion to a wider audience.

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Will trade unions survive in the platform economy?

Via a non-exhaustive mapping of various examples in Western European countries, this Working Paper explores to what extent the collective representation and voice of digital platform workers are being shaped by current dynamics in the platform economy. The argument is developed that currently emerging patterns hint at a possible co-existence or combinations of mainstream trade unions and other unions and union-like organisations defending platform workers’ needs and interests.

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Automation, digitalisation and platforms: Implications for work and employment

The onset of the digital revolution has resulted in technological advances that are constantly evolving. A key element of concern to policymakers is the impact that these changes will have on the world of work and employment. This report reviews the history of the digital revolution to date, placing it in the context of other periods of marked technological advances and examining how technological change interacts with changes in institutions.

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Social Europe Edition Book

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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Some important progress has been made since the crisis, belatedly and often imperfectly, in reforming the institutional framework of the Euro Area. However, the existential weaknesses – redenomination risk given doubts about the effectiveness of the Lender-of-Last-Resort function and the inadequacy of measures to address inherent divergence trends between member countries – have not been resolved. For as long as that is so, the euro area will remain on shaky ground. This report reviews proposals to strengthen the institutional setup of the euro area.