Hello and welcome to Itchi Boy Podcast, Voices on the World of Work.

I am your host, Bianca Luna Fabrice, and in this episode, we will be hearing all about EU social policy.

This episode stems from a very recent transfer special issue that you can find link in the show notes.

My guest today is Professor Martin Kern.

He is Professor of Social Security and Labor Relations at the University of Amsterdam.

Martin, thank you so much for being with me and with us today.

I have a very first question to you that might seem quite a large question, but if you could

perhaps streamline it a bit, that would be of great help.

So what I can see emerges quite clearly from the issue is that the discourse of the EU institutions

with regards to social policy at the EU level has dramatically changed over the past few decades.

Perhaps you could retrace the history of EU social policy in a few words.

Okay, well, first of all, let me thank you, Bianca, for inviting me to this podcast.

Really nice to be here. The history of social policy in the EU is a big question.

So let me try and scale it down.

First of all, I think it's good to note that we've had a really resurgence of social policy at the EU level since 2017,

when the European Pillar of Social Rights was proclaimed.

Since then, so that's the past six, seven years, we see that the social policy discourse

of, in particular, European Commission and the European Parliament become much more social.

But it's also not only the discourse.

There's really an important number of new EU social directives, recommendations and other social initiatives that have emerged at a surprising speed.

And especially in historical perspective, this is really quite remarkable, I would say.

Because originally when the EU or the predecessors of the EU started in the late 50s, the EU was,

...