politics, economy and employment & labour
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher that publishes content examining issues in politics, economy and employment & labour. This archive brings together Social Europe articles on political issues.
Do you still remember the story about the New Machine Age? Figure 1 (below) can help you stop dreaming: Growth rates of labour productivity (i.e. value added per working hour) in the US, Japan and Europe have never since 1945 been as low as during the past ten years! Remember that value added is identical […]
In many countries, where you live tends to be an accurate predictor of what or whom you are voting for. This was most evident in the maps of the electoral geography of voting for “Leave” and “Remain” in the United Kingdom’s June referendum on European Union membership. A similar pattern can be found in the distribution of […]
In pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems claims are tied to the development of GDP as well as wages and salaries. This not only makes economic sense, because the pensioner’s claims are tied to the volume of goods and services available, but provides considerably more reliability. While rates of return on financial markets fluctuate drastically and unpredictably, […]
It should have surprised nobody that it took a bare three months for Theresa May to metamorphose from tepid advocate of continuing British membership of the European Union into an enthusiastic proselytiser at the Conservative Party conference for the benefits of “national sovereignty and independence” outside the Union. Her refusal during the referendum campaign to […]
The fall-out from the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent European debt crisis has put labor unions on the defensive. Although these crises were largely precipitated by agents of capital, unions have been unable to assert themselves as a political counterweight to big business and finance. They have instead endured a number of political offensives […]
In summarizing the results of last year’s parliamentary elections in Poland I briefly mentioned that “the rule of Catholic conservatives might stand in opposition to respecting the rights of women “. It took less than a year for this prophecy to come true. Thousands of women in Poland are joining Black Protests to demonstrate against […]
“Never let a crisis go to waste” has always been one of the European Union’s guiding principles. But what about five simultaneous crises? Today, the EU faces what Frans Timmermans, European Commission Vice President, describes as a “multi-crisis”: Brexit, refugee flows, fiscal austerity, geopolitical threats from East and South, and “illiberal democracy” in central Europe. […]
The new European Pillar of Social Rights represents an attempt to lift social monitoring onto an equal footing with macroeconomic surveillance in the European Semester. While this step is to be welcomed in principle, the introduction of clear-cut social indicators would improve it significantly. After taking office in autumn 2014, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker […]
This April, responding to an incident of refugee ping-pong between the Czech Republic and Germany, the Czech Interior Minister, Milan Chovanec, told the press that his country will not be “a place for games of asylum roulette”. Chovanec was angered when a group of Iraqi citizens who were brought to the Czech Republic as asylum […]
We have already begun to hear laments that Corbyn’s second victory means the end of Labour as a broad church. This is nonsense, unless that church is one where only people from the right and centre of the party are allowed to be its priests. Alison Charlton (@alicharlo) responded to my tweet to that effect […]
In the digital age, there are fewer routine jobs because of a higher risk of automation. But a great paradox of this age is this: workers in most types of jobs, including high-skilled ones, are reporting higher levels of routine at work. This emerges from a new study of the task content of occupations in […]
In the eyes of its citizens the EU has become the patron of an unfair modernisation that benefits only a handful of people. It can only regain trust if and when it protects people from the social dislocations thrown up by globalisation. If you read the essays that have appeared up to now in the […]
