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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Should digital labour platforms be treated as private employment agencies?

This Foresight Brief examines whether digital labour platforms should be treated as private employment agencies. Platforms like LinkedIn may rightfully be perceived by the general public to be mere social networks, but underneath their sleek design, they also act as an employment service. This brief specifically focused on one of the central principles of international labour standards on employment services, namely that jobseekers must not be charged any fees or costs for job-finding services, unless those fees or costs have been approved by a competent authority.

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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.

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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The future of manufacturing in Europe

Manufacturing is set to be core to Europe’s future. More jobs will be created and growth will increase if certain economic and industrial changes are well managed over the coming years. The main findings from the explorative project on the Future of manufacturing in Europe reveal that early adoption of emerging, game-changing technologies will give Europe a decisive competitive advantage and Europe will benefit more than other trading blocs from full implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement in terms of growth and jobs.

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