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This chapter initiates the book's statistical portrait of employment trends in industrialized contexts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This portrait illustrates the slow erosion of full‐time permanent employment in Australia, Canada, the European Union 15, and to a lesser extent the United States. Linking employment trends to sex/gender divisions of unpaid work, it also reveals that, despite formal equality, full‐time permanent employment and non‐standard employment remain gendered and shaped by immigration status to the present. Concern about the spread of precarious employment accompanied these trends. At the international level, the result was a series of regulations aimed at shoring up this employment norm: adopted between 1990 and 2008 and organized around its central pillars of working time, continuity, and the employment relationship, these regulations seek to ensure that citizen‐workers do not see their employment and occupational opportunities or working conditions limited by barriers based on form of employment.

This chapter analyses contemporary regulations addressing precariousness in forms of employment diverging from the SER's central pillar of continuous employment. The analysis centres on the 1999 EU Directive on Fixed‐Term Work, which subscribes to equal treatment, and the 2008 EU Directive on Temporary Agency Work, qualifying equal treatment, and efforts to regulate both types of temporary employment in the EU 15. It shows that while SER‐centric approaches extend some protections and benefits to fixed‐term workers, lesser protections apply to temporary agency workers. In many member states, these workers, especially migrant workers and women, tend to be especially precarious since they lack both an open‐ended and bilateral employment relationship.

This chapter briefly reviews the history of the EU as it relates to the role of EU institutions in environmental policy-making. It explores EU decision-making institutions and processes and the relationship between the EU and its member states, with particular reference to role and responsibilities in implementing the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol and otherwise addressing climate change. It then reviews EU climate change law and policy to date, focusing on regional policy initiatives. In examining EU governance systems and climate initiatives, it seeks to begin revealing similarities and differences in EU and US political systems as a preface to more in-depth comparisons in Chapters 7 and 8.

This chapter explores how three EU member states—Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland—reflect the challenges, progress, and setbacks that define the contours of European climate policy. It begins by exploring the roles of Germany and the UK as members of the EU-15 and nominal regional leaders in efforts to advance progressive climate policies. The analysis focuses first and foremost on Germany as the EU's most vocal and active proponent of aggressive climate policy. It then more briefly assesses the climate policy of the UK as a similarly important player in regional climate policy. In order to create a more inclusive picture of the challenges inherent in creating common climate policies for the full EU-27, this chapter also examines Poland's role in—and response to—efforts to create a common European rule of law with regard to climate change.