The sixteenth edition of Social policy in the European Union: state of play has a triple ambition. The book, compiled by the Observatoire Social Européenne (OSE), provides easily accessible information to a wide audience about recent developments in both EU and domestic social policymaking. The volume provides also a more analytical reading, embedding the key developments of the year 2014 in recent academic discourses. Third, the forward-looking perspective of the book aims to provide stakeholders and policymakers with specific tools that allow them to discern new opportunities to influence policymaking. The book cites that ‘modernisation’ of collective bargaining has become ‘a widely used euphemism that, in practical terms, points to a higher political pressure (for) wage restraint and ... more decentralized wagesetting mechanisms’. The result has been ‘a Troika for everyone’. The impact of ‘structural reforms’ has been in many countries a rapid growth of a low-wage sector with weak unionisation and little or no collective bargaining.
English: http://www.etui.org/Publications2/Books/Social-policy-in-the-European-Union …
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.