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This chapter examines the European Employment Strategy, particularly the employment guidelines, the institutional framework for employment policy generation, and the implications of the attempt to integrate economic, employment and social policies. The influence of economic policy in the form of the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines and the Stability and Growth Pact; the three-pillar approach of the European Employment Pact, placing economic reform (the Cardiff process) and macro-economic dialogue (the Cologne process) alongside the coordinated employment strategy (the Luxembourg process); and the link between employment and competitiveness are all factors which strongly suggest a deregulatory agenda for the European Employment Strategy. Such emphasis on economic cohesion and convergence, at the expense of social policy and social protection, was thrown into sharp relief following the landmark European Council meeting in Lisbon in 2000, where for the first time since the introduction of the Employment Title, an explicit attempt was made to fully integrate policies on employment, economic reform and social cohesion.

This chapter assesses the extent to which the European Employment Strategy has ‘Europeanised’ national policy. The legal significance of the National Action Plans for Employment (NAPs) is analysed, along with the extent to which the interaction between the Employment Strategy and the European Monetary Union has given rise to new forms of corporatism in national wage and collective bargaining, EU Member States' NAPs since 1998, and the impact of EU internal market law on national employment and social policy. The chapter also focuses on the impact of the Employment Strategy in two Member States, the Netherlands and the UK, or rather, on the interaction between the objectives of EU policy and domestic political agendas for reform of welfare states and labour markets.

New social risks are at the forefront of the EU's social policy agenda. In part, this is because a new social risk approach fits with open market policies, which stress constraints on state interventions and the importance of adapting social provision to meet economic goals; in part because old social risk areas are so heavily occupied by existing national government policies that it is difficult to find support for innovations. During the 1980s and 1990s, a number of attempts to develop international policy harmonization were pursued. These failed due to the difficulty of achieving cross‐national consensus. There are a number of relevant directives, chiefly in the areas of equality of opportunity for men and women and other labour market issues. The most important current developments, however, are in the area of ‘soft law’ through the Open Method of Co‐ordination and the National Action Plans in relation to employment, social exclusion, pensions, health and social care. The European Employment Strategy, with its stress on ‘flexicurity’, is the most advanced of these. It is at present unclear to what extent this process will achieve substantial changes in comparison with the importance of the economic pressures from the Single European Market.

This chapter examines EU law and policy in the field of employment and considers the extent to which they reflect the objectives of combating racism and promoting ethnic equality. It examines EU employment legislation, such as that on worker participation. In the policy sphere, it looks at the European Employment Strategy and the European Social Fund. It concludes that issues of racism find their way onto the agenda with more ease in new governance processes; however, their fluidity means that the issue can subsequently fall off the agenda at a later stage.

This chapter examines the conceptualisation of European unemployment by comparing the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Jobs Study and the European Commission's White Paper Growth, Competitiveness and Employment. The emergence of a European employment policy is examined in terms of a shift from a social policy agenda to an employment policy agenda, arising out of the interaction between economic and social policy, but owing more to the former, in particular with regard to the perspective adopted on the role of labour market institutions (rigidities) in unemployment. The chapter also considers how the European Employment Strategy connects with the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and how this link (essentially bringing employment within the criteria for the monetary union) has placed employment policy within a particular discourse, one which takes a distinctive perspective on the role of labour market rigidities, in creating or perpetuating unemployment.

This chapter provides context for disability and employment policy in the European Union (EU) by highlighting the key provisions of the EU’s founding treaties in these areas. It then outlines relevant aspects of the three EU-level strategies that together set out EU disability employment policy: hard law, or legislative intervention, requiring member states to ensure that certain specified requirements or standards are achieved by their domestic law; experimentalist governance, in the form of the Open Method of Co-ordination; and direct funding. Finally, the chapter identifies lessons that can be learned from the EU’s experience of harnessing these three different tools to achieve its strategic objectives and to consider the extent to which they might have relevance to the world beyond the rather unique parameters of the EU.

This chapter focuses on those employment measures commonly known as active labour market policies (ALMPs). It starts by providing a comparative historical analysis of ALMPs, suggesting that these measures effectively date back to the early 20th century. However, in recent years their content has been altered to encompass a higher proportion of supply-side measures, typically accompanied by more stringent qualifying criteria for the receipt of unemployment benefits. ALMPs have now become an effective mechanism for the control of the labour market. In light of these trends, the chapter questions the compatibility of some of the current forms of ALMPs with some notions of ‘right to work’ underpinned by human rights and decent work concerns.

This concluding chapter refocuses on two sets of issues which highlight the competing approaches to European integration: the tension between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, and that between regulation and deregulation. These competing visions have resulted in a European Employment Strategy which is itself an uneven synthesis of rival, yet overlapping, policy discourses. That the attempted synthesis is uneven is evidenced by the dominance of economic policy discourses, which emphasise labour market efficiency and flexibility, over social policy discourses which have been traditionally concerned with employment protection and social protection. Furthermore, the Employment Strategy has exposed tensions between the adoption of minimal regulatory standards at EU level, permitting regulatory competition between Member States (negative integration), and centralised harmonisation through common European policies to shape the conditions under which markets operate (positive integration).

This book explores the European Union's strategy to combat unemployment, and how this strategy connects with discourses around the legitimacy and content of EU social policy, as well as discourses around EU economic policy and the wider labour market flexibility debate on the role of labour law in job creation. Drawing upon economic theory and socio-legal methodologies, the book uncovers the legal and economic underpinnings of the European Employment Strategy in order to make explicit the assumptions on which the EU is building its strategy and to discern what the implications of these assumptions will be for labour law, social protection, and industrial relations. This exploration of the development of the EU's employment policy raises a number of questions as to the legitimacy and direction of EU regulation of the labour market; in particular, the tension between state action (intergovernmentalism) and Community competence (supranationalism), and that between regulation and deregulation.

This chapter assesses the achievements and shortcomings of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in shifting national labour market policies towards a social investment agenda. The impact of the EES is mediated by institutional legacies, economic and financial situations, and political priorities and agendas in the member states. The chapter argues that the contradictory pressures for social and economic reform from the EU pose a challenge for all member states, in particular for the new member states, which have been pursuing a different reform path. In all countries studied, it is domestic challenges rather than the EU agenda that have been determining labour market policy, where economic and financial priorities have driven forward employment reform. While the full employment model has been embraced at the level of discourse, the reforms undertaken have been in the direction of recommodification, rather than towards comprehensive social investment in human resources. If the labour market component of social investment was only partially achieved before the financial crisis, it is even more of a challenge in the midst of it.

This chapter draws on a project looking at the development of gender-sensitive employment policies in the EU to report how policy tensions have evolved between national and supranational agencies. The first section focuses on the development of gender equality as a social objective of the EU. The second section examines the rise and fall of gender mainstreaming within the European Employment Strategy (EES) and the Growth and Jobs Strategy. The third section evaluates the recent gender equality initiatives within the EU and identifies some positive developments, both in defining the goal of a more gender equal society and in the analysis of the factors that act as barriers to equality within the economic and social systems in Europe. The chapter ends with some reflections on the future for gender equality within the European project.

Policy coordination in one form or another has been a feature of EU governance for the past two decades. Developing initially as a mechanism through which to coordinate national economic policies in the shadow of economic and monetary union (EMU), and extending to the coordination of employment policies through the European Employment Strategy, by the 2000s, policy coordination was being heralded as a new form of governance to be deployed to achieve the aims of the Lisbon Strategy of economic and social reform. Indeed, such was the interest in this new form of EU governance, it even acquired its own distinctive nomenclature—the ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC).

This chapter focuses on the debate about activation and gender equality at the EU level in general and within the EES in particular. It demonstrates how activation has developed as a network of concepts and meanings in the course of the EES. In particular, it traces the development of concepts, problem definitions, strategies, and priorities in its gender equality dimension. Most important, while this remains contested gender equality has been reframed from a human right to a functional requirement for full employment mainly measured in terms of male/female employment rates.

This chapter examines the changes in European Union (EU) anti-discrimination law and its position within the theoretical framework of European social policy. It identifies the factors that may explain the transformation in the role of EU in regulating discrimination. These include the European Employment Strategy, the convergence of national legal traditions, and the contribution of European civil society. This chapter stresses the need to develop complementary measures to ensure the efficacy of the directive.

This chapter talks about developments found at the level of the European Union (EU). It presents a discursive analysis of a selection of policy documents of the EU that are relevant in the context of activation policies. One of these is the documents that were produced in the context of the Lisbon Strategy and the European Employment Strategy (EES). The chapter also considers the political status and the paradoxical rhetoric of European discourse.