The EU's new social agenda: an analysis

Since 2010 not a week has gone by without one European Union (EU) member state government or another announcing major reform plans affecting social legislation, the system of social protection, labour law or collective bargaining. The arguments put forward by the governments to justify these reforms systematically refer to the crisis, in particular the crisis of public finances. In the construction of these arguments, the role played by the EU institutions cannot be overlooked; not only do we hear a repetition of the standard discourse concerning the need to ‘modernise’ the European social model (in other words, the differing national social models) in order to ‘save’ this – or these – models from the crisis; we also witness the creation of various European institutional mechanisms by means of which the governments undertake to carry out these reforms (the European semester and its arsenal of multilateral surveillance mechanisms, the EuroPlus Pact, the Budgetary Pact, the specific country recommendations, etc.). The convergence of the discourse has recently culminated in a proposal, emanating from the EU Council Presidency, for the establishment of a common policy for the reform of retirement systems .

Our paper is structured in three parts. The first briefly reviews the reforms adopted in the member states in the fields of labour law and of social protection. It covers the whole EU27, thereby providing an overview of the reforms in these areas rather than limiting the picture to the five most frequently mentioned countries (Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Italy).

 In a second part, we will see that these are radical reforms in that they call into question the very foundations on which labour law and social protection systems have been constructed. What emerges is that, even though the reforms are being launched in countries characterized by quite specific economic and social situations, the measures proposed show a definite tendency towards convergence, thereby suggesting that their inspiration derives from common roots.

 In a third part, we will enquire into the reasons underlying a programme of structural reforms of this kind. We will see that the argument whereby the crisis is put forward as the justification for this programme is hardly convincing. Accordingly, it is necessary to look elsewhere for explanations, and these will be seen to be linked, in the first place, to the constraints of Monetary Union and, secondly and more prosaically, to a political agenda.