Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime: Methodological Challenges and Innovations of a New Research Agenda

Trade unions play a major role in democratic interest intermediation. This role is currently threatened by vertical interventions of political executives in the context of the European Union’s (EU’s) new economic governance (NEG) regime. We are therefore proposing a new research agenda that aims to explore the challenges and possibilities that the NEG poses to labour politics. Our agenda focuses on the way in which labour movements respond to the EU’s NEG regime. Until recently, labour politics had been shaped mainly by ‘horizontal’ market integration through the free movement of goods, capital, services and people. Since the adoption of the ‘Six-Pack’ of EU law on economic governance in 2011, however, the latter has been complemented by ‘vertical’ integration affected through the direct surveillance of Member states’ macroeconomic policies, including industrial relations and social policy (Erne, 2015). The resulting regime opens contradictory possibilities for labour movements. On the one hand, the NEG’s reliance on vertical surveillance makes decisions