The Quality Jobs Act covers common standards for being able to ‘go home’ and disconnect from remote work, and limits AI’s role in recruitment or scrutiny of workers’ performance.
Almost half of workers helping families care for children, older people, and people with disabilities in Europe have considered quitting due to low pay and bad working conditions.
‘EU Inc’, or the 28th regime, started as an EU project to facilitate the expansion of small companies. Now, trade unions warn it could erode years of hard-earned labour rights.
The EU’s single market has come up against a labour force-sized issue time and time again. A new bundle of regulations takes aim at streamlining hiring across the bloc, although critics worry this only facilitates recruiters while leaving workers still exposed to vulnerabilities in the workplaces
Europe’s Circular Economy Act can reduce dependencies, strengthen industrial resilience and create skilled green jobs. But it will only succeed if workers, working conditions and social dialogue are placed at its heart.
By using forced-labour claims to justify tariffs and threaten Europe’s digital and climate rules, Washington is testing whether the EU dares to turn its own powerful regulatory arsenal against American companies.
Europe’s failure to shield workers from extreme heat is becoming an €800bn threat to jobs, wages, and national budgets, as farms and construction sites grind to a halt.
Pakistani women and children pick cotton in bonded labour for a few euros a day while Europe’s biggest fashion brands exploit legal loopholes to keep their clothes and their consciences officially clean.
As EU leaders talk tough on cutting immigration, their own data shows that without more foreign workers Europe’s pension systems, hospitals and care homes could buckle under the weight of its ageing citizens.
MEPs have also warned against the EU’s new corporate ’28th regime’ being used to create a European equivalent to the US state of Delaware.
Trains buckle, schools shut and outdoor workers struggle through 40°C days. Trade unions and scientists are warning that Europe’s heatwave is no longer just a ‘weather story’ but a full showdown over who is responsible for keeping workers safe.
Youth unemployment is going down, but many are not even looking for work. A new report found that the EU can’t monitor them, and what progress has been made is not being measure long-term.
Europe’s alleged competitiveness gap with the United States and China has become a defining theme in Brussels policymaking. But experts argue that the use of selective data to support simplification is “close to political manipulation” and “definitely cherry-picking”.
“We are barely making it,” admitted Roxana Mînzatu, the EU commissioner for social rights and skills, who presented a plan earlier this month to eradicate poverty by 2025 throughout the EU.
‘We are not yet seeing the waves of redundancies that are feared’, European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde said, but stressed Europe was benefitting for AI-productivity gains on a par with the US and China.
Brussels’ drive to cut digital “burdens” is spilling into labour law. A recent paper by lobby group BusinessEurope calls for a sweeping “labour market omnibus” to reduce obligations under EU social law, raising fears that competitiveness rhetoric could undermine workers’ rights and weaken Europe’s social model.
As Europe’s baby boomers enter retirement, experts agree that reforms are needed to ensure the sustainability of European pensions. However, there is considerable debate on which reforms should be implemented and how they impact elderly poverty and pension inequality.
Europe debates shorter workweeks as Poland pilots a four-day model without pay cuts, following mixed experiences and perspectives from the UK, France, Spain, Lithuania and Greece, balancing productivity, wellbeing and competitiveness concerns.
Influential. Investigative. Independent. EUobserver is a online non-profit news outlet reporting on the European Union.
The argument is that Europe underperforms in tech and biotech because it is “too expensive” to fire people.
That may sound intuitively appealing but it is profoundly misleading.
