European Soft Governance and Worker Protection: Making Ends Meet?

Delivering on the benefits of integration to its citizens as a basis for its legitimacy requires the EU to operationalise the goals of economic growth and decent living and working conditions through its laws and policies. Employment regulation plays an increasing role in EU strategies to achieve competitiveness and a sustainable European social model. Europeanisation of employment governance is progressing – albeit ingrained in a binary approach. The insistence on policy coordination to be voluntary (OMC) denies the reality of increasing complementarity of ‘soft’ coordination and binding rules. Indeed, a fundamental tension between the EU’s hierarchical constitutional system and its differentiated governance architecture shapes its identity as a polity. To solve policy problems and respond to societal needs, concepts of law and constitutional principles in operation face seemingly irreconcilable exigencies in dealing with the transformed way of ‘governing’ at all levels. In order to overcome this tension between EU Constitutionalism and New Governance, recognising the postnational character of the EU polity is conducive to a re-conception of the law-governance relationship. The paper will argue that incorporating the notion of hybridity facilitates a more inclusive conception of EU governance as overarching framework, constituted by hybridised objectives, interacting instruments and modes of governance, poly-centred decision-making and underpinned by a set of fundamental norms and principles. It will be proposed that considering advancing economic integration, the EU polity’s future may well depend on making deliberate use of hybrid governance to facilitate the finding of European answers to the question of improving worker protection.