EU Social policy - state of play with Bart Vanhercke

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ETUI

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🗓️ 24 March 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Despite a spectacular economic reaction to the pandemic crisis, which stands in stark contrast to the austerity-driven response to the 2008 financial and economic crisis, Bart Vanhercke and the co-authors of Bilan Social express concerns about the so-called ‘social affairs players’ being sidelined in the new Recovery and Resilience Facility, the fuzzy EU commitment to gender issues, the EU response to rising in-work poverty and the setting a new social-ecological contract.

The pandemic's longer-term economic consequences are not clear at this stage. No one can exclude that a real social crisis will quickly follow the vaccination campaign in the headlines. For the time being, however, it’s the unprecedented –and unexpected coordinated response by the EU’s and its 27 Members States and the European Commission that stands out. The EU’s response indeed contributed to mitigate the impact on unemployment (compared to the rest of the world) and demonstrated that the EU can react quickly and forcefully.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to ETIWI podcast, Voices on the World of Work.
0:07.2	I am Bianca Luna Fabres, communication officer here at the Institute, and I'll be guiding you through the podcast.
0:14.7	This episode is centered around the joint ETIOSA publication Social Policy Policy in the European Union State of Play 2020,
0:22.6	edited by Bart Vanerker, Slovene Svinoz Posova and Boris Frantadu.
0:26.6	You can download the publication for free at etuI.org slash publications.
0:31.6	Before we actually dive in the episode, let me just introduce you to our guest,
0:36.6	Bart Vanerke. He has been director of Oza, the European Social Observatory since 2010.
0:42.3	He is associate at K-11 and he's also a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges.
0:48.3	Hi Bart, let's start with the most crucial question.
0:51.3	So how has the EU handled the crisis?
0:53.3	Two words, really, to coin the EU's response
0:57.0	to the pandemic. And these two words have a rather optimistic connotation. Their solidarity and their
1:04.3	vision. Let's begin with solidarity, not in a romantic or idealized sense of the word, but really in
1:10.4	its core meaning of mutual responsibility.
1:13.6	What happened to the surprise of many observers, I would say, is that indeed solidarity between member states has been an essential component of the management of this crisis.
1:24.6	Now, this wasn't evident, let's be clear about that. At the start of the
1:28.6	pandemic, the shadow of the austerity-driven management of the 2008 crisis was still looming very large over Europe.
1:37.9	And so I think it's fair to say that many of us observers of EU policies and EU policymaking were quite surprised about the EU's response to the pandemic.
1:48.0	What does this actually mean in concrete terms?
1:51.0	There were some historically long battles in the European Council last summer.
1:56.0	And the result of those deliberations was that in a remarkable short time span, a battery of measures were taken that were previously unthinkable.
2:07.6	So that would really be the starting point of the answer to your question.
	...

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