EU Governance of Employment Relations and Its Discontents

Chapter 6 shows that workers’ wages and employment relations were, until the 2008 crisis, shaped by horizontal market pressures rather than direct political vertical EU interventions in the labour policy area. That changed radically after the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime. We found that the EU’s NEG prescriptions on wage levels, collective bargaining, and hiring and firing mechanisms followed a consistent trajectory that furthered the commodification of labour in Italy, Ireland, and Romania, but less so in Germany. Instead, Germany received decommodifying NEG prescriptions on wage policy that were linked to a rebalance-the-EU-economy policy rationale. Although this policy rationale was still compatible with NEG’s overarching commodifying script, the diverging policy orientation of prescriptions in this area across countries made it hard for unions to challenge NEG transnationally.