Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Freedom. For over sixty years, a group of states has fought to secure greater freedom of movement for Europe’s workers: their ‘fourth freedom’. The Treaty of Rome (ToR) trumpeted the ‘Freedom of movement for workers shall be secured within the Community by the end of the transitional period at the latest’ (ToR, 1957: Art. 48). Countless treaties, directives and court decisions have ploughed a path to make it easier for workers to find employment away from home. The focus of this effort has been on reducing the regulatory and administrative barriers that are held to inhibit the free movement of workers.
This effort at removing barriers is unique, important and popular. Although migrant workers continue to struggle with different languages and cultures, they face fewer formal barriers to mobility. Public opinion surveys have consistently showed that Europeans consider the free movement of people, goods and services within the European Union (EU) as the most positive result of European integration (see, for example, Eurobarometer, 2007: 94, and 2010). While there has been some critical discussion within Europe about the political cost of this fourth freedom (witness Brexit and the growing xenophobia across Europe), most policymakers and analysts continue to embrace the right to free migration in Europe, as do I.
If we can agree about the desirability of freer labour mobility, it is more difficult to agree about why, how, and even if, we should integrate Europe’s sundry national labour markets. Indeed, we have never asked ourselves some of the most pressing questions related to labour market integration:
Does ‘labour mobility’ require a ‘common market for labour’?
What do we hope to achieve in creating a common labour market?
What (or who?) is a common labour market meant to serve?
Chapter 5 we saw how Europe’s labour markets remain remarkably segmented: they continue to reflect unique national and regional characteristics, despite a concerted political effort – stretching over decades – to reduce barriers to mobility. We have one common market, but a plethora of local labour markets, each reacting differently to external stimuli. Unfortunately, Europe’s approach to market integration has made it more difficult to address these local needs. It is now the market, more than political authority, which must respond to the needs of regional economic adjustment. In clearing a level playing field for that market, Europe has undermined the economic resilience of its member states. Consequently, local labour markets are increasingly unable to withstand, recover from, and/or reorganize in the face of market, competitive and environmental shocks. The evidence of this incapacity lies in Europe’s frightfully high unemployment figures, as presented in Chapter 1.
Chapter 5 endeavoured to show that local labour market variance can be the result of several different factors. Some regions may be overly dependent upon a particular employer, industry or sector, as we saw in the case of Washington State and Boeing (in Chapter 3). Other regions will have local markets that are precariously exposed to pressure from third-country competitors, such as China. Still others may be more or less susceptible to broader external shocks, as was evident in the varied responses to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 outbreak. Local differences of these sort require localized policy responses in the face of changing conditions.
One of the most significant differences separating markets is their level of economic wealth and development.
The Great Recession revealed the inadequacies of Europe’s economic order. Having lost many important tools of economic policymaking, as described in Chapter 6, member states were unable to protect themselves from the financial storm and were constrained in their capacity to rebuild quickly after the storm had passed. The Great Recession clearly demonstrated that Europe remains divided in terms of its levels of economic development and that its individual member states are exposed to the world’s economy in significantly different ways.
It has been broadly accepted that due to the limited availability of adjustment mechanisms for national economies within the EMU, unemployment and social crises risk developing to a greater extent in a currency union than in a more flexible exchange rate regime, unless they are anticipated and addressed by the currency union on a collective basis. (Andor, 2013a: 2, emphasis added)
This is clearly a step in the right direction. Further progress is evident in the EU’s initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The varied and asymmetric impact of the pandemic across member states has underscored the need to secure more local responses and resources. Still, Europe has a very long way to go.
This chapter returns to the original discussions about market integration in Europe, to show that policymakers in the 1950s faced the same trade-off that we face today (local democratic accountability vs overall efficiency), but prioritized differently. There are several possible explanations for why Europe eventually choose a different path than the one laid out in this chapter. One explanation lies in a radically different international context in the immediate postwar period. Another explanation has to do with the declining influence of labour in Europe. The pages that follow provide a glimpse into both explanations.
Whatever the reason, it is clear that Europe, anno 2021, is a very different beast than the one imagined in the Treaty of Rome (ToR). In 1957, the common market was still being directed by a ‘Community’ (not a Market, or a Union), and the reason for creating a common market for labour (as well as for services and capital), was to ‘promote throughout the Community a harmonious development of economic activities, a continuous and balanced expansion, an increase in stability, an accelerated raising of the standard of living and closer relations between the States belonging to it’ (ToR, 1957: Art. 2, emphasis added).
This chapter looks back on Europe’s initial motivation to build a common market, in order to show how far Europe has strayed from its original ambitions.1 I begin by reminding the reader of the general post-war context and the plethora of new international agreements promising to build a better Europe.
Given the degree of local labour market variation, as seen in Chapter 5, and the absence of other available adjustment tools (whether at the national or the EU level, as seen in Chapters 6 and 7), member states have remarkably little capacity to influence their local labour markets. As a result, much of the burden of economic adjustment has been pushed down to lower levels of the economy. In particular, European policymakers hope that an integrated market can clear itself, without local political interference, and that mobile workers and capital can fill the void created by the absence of other instruments for economic management.
European labour markets are still exposed to any number of different economic shocks and crises. Over the past decade, local labour markets have needed to respond to a global financial crisis (2008–10), a dramatic fall in the price of oil (2014), a refugee crisis (2015) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–21). In the face of such crises, how can a member state buoy its labour market when its monetary policy is set in Frankfurt, its regulatory and fiscal policies are largely set in Brussels, and there is little fiscal capacity at the EU level? What can a poor state do?
Let’s imagine that the poor state is Greece, and that it is hit harder by a shock than any other member state. (This is not purely a hypothetical example.) Because Greece is a part of the eurozone, it cannot devalue its currency or impose capital controls (unless granted permission by EU officials).
In the early years of European integration, there was a broad recognition of the need to integrate economies in a way that allowed policymakers to stabilize their home markets. As we saw in Chapter 4, this was done to ensure that market integration didn’t drive labour conditions and wages downward in a competitive race to the bottom. Over the decades, this lesson has been lost on policymakers, as member states have jettisoned many of the tools necessary for local economic stabilization.
Today, European integration is animated by a belief that bigger markets are better than smaller ones; that integration propels harmonization; and that markets can be self-correcting. Policymakers and academics have come to believe that socioeconomic imbalances across Europe’s various regions and countries can (and will) adjust automatically on their own accord. This belief lies implicitly behind the pursuit of a common currency and the need for standardized (read common) rules for member state fiscal, regulatory and procurement policies (among others). Such efforts have been justified by reference to the needs of a level playing field and with the promise of increased efficiencies. As a result of these pursuits, however, there is less room remaining for local policy autonomy at the member state level.
The problem is that European labour markets remain remarkably segregated and unique. The goal of this chapter is to describe that heterogeneity. The continued existence of a multitude of local labour markets – each following their own economic path – remains a significant challenge for Europe.
Europe’s ambition for a unified labour market is as old as the Treaty of Rome. This ambition is arguably older and stronger than the hope to unify goods, services and capital markets in Europe. Despite this long and concerted effort, Europe still lacks an overarching approach to labour market unification. There are no comparative studies that examine labour market integration in other states and no commissioned reports focused on the costs and benefits of creating a common, continental-sized, labour market. We still lack a theory of optimum labour areas.
Europe’s approach to capital market integration could not be more different. In 1999, the EU began a grand social experiment: it wanted to integrate once national money markets into a common European currency. To do so, policymakers drew from a broad-based and established literature on optimum currency areas (OCAs) and academics studied previous experiments with monetary integration (for example, in the US, the Latin Monetary Union, the Scandinavian Monetary Union) to anticipate the potential costs and benefits of jettisoning local currencies in exchange for the euro. Numerous studies were conducted by public and private research groups, with an eye to gauging the costs and benefits involved.1 While it is possible to argue that the advice generated by this vast literature was not heeded, no one doubts that it was desirable, necessary and relevant.
This difference in approach is remarkable and difficult to understand. After all, many believe that the integration of labour markets provokes more political and social turbulence than the integration of capital markets.
This chapter considers the effect of market integration on organized labour in Europe. To the extent that workaway and competitive wage pressure have become a more important means for securing local labour market adjustments, they are bound to affect the relative power of labour. This chapter considers the impact of these changes on the power and influence of workers as a class, and how organized labour in Europe has responded to these changes.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, it is common to measure labour power along two dimensions: in terms of both structural and associational power. Most of this book has aimed to describe how changes in European markets have undermined the structural power of labour. In the preceding chapters, we have seen how many instruments have been removed from the policymakers’ toolbox, leaving national authorities with less capacity to manage their local labour markets. Member states have jettisoned their monetary and regulatory policies, and their fiscal policies have been severely constrained by the needs of a monetary union (Chapter 6). The resulting policy void has not been filled by a suitable common budget or social policy at the European level (Chapter 7). Finally, European factor flows (Chapter 8) have proven entirely inadequate for the job: capital flows tend to make things worse, not better, and the scope of labour flows across Europe is entirely insufficient (and for good reasons). The result of these changes can be seen in a significant decrease in the structural power of labour, as evident in high levels of unemployment, low wages, increased workaway, dwindling social service protections and other indicators.
