Dalla crisi finanziaria alla pandemia di Covid-19: un lungo Semestre per i diritti dei lavoratori

In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the EU adopted a new economic governance regime. In response to the Covid pandemic, NEG is set to change again. To understand the EU’s response to the current pandemic crisis, however, we must first understand NEG. This article therefore analyses NEG and its relevance for labour politics. It does so through an in-depth analysis of NEG prescriptions on wage, employment protection and collective bargaining policy in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania between 2009 and 2019. In contrast to supporters of the «socialization thesis», our main conclusion is that over the last decade the EU’s interventions in these three industrial relations policy areas continued to be dominated by a liberalization agenda that is commodifying labour, albeit to a different degree across the uneven European political economy. Even so, our contextualised analysis also enables us to detect contradictions that could provide European labour movements with opportunities to pursue countervailing action.