In Chapter 13, we provide a preliminary analysis of the policy orientation of the EU’s post-Covid-19 new economic governance (NEG) regime to give policymakers, unionists, and social-movement activists an idea about possible future trajectories of EU governance of employment relations and public services. We do that on the basis of not only the recently adopted EU laws in these two policy areas, such as the decommodifying Minimum Wage Directive, but also EU executives’ post-Covid-19 NEG prescriptions in two areas (employment relations, public services), three public sectors (transport services, water services, healthcare services), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania). Vertical NEG interventions in national wage policies paradoxically cleared the way for the decommodifying EU Minimum Wage Directive by effectively making wage policy an EU policymaking issue, but, in the area of public services, we see an accentuation of the trend of NEG prescriptions in recent years: more public investments but also much more private sector involvement in the delivery of public services.

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.

Chapter 11 compares the policy orientation of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions in two policy areas (employment relations, public services), three sectors (transport, water, healthcare), four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania) from 2009 to 2019. It reveals that almost all qualitative prescriptions pointed in a commodifying direction. Most quantitative prescriptions tasked governments to curtail wages and public expenditures too, but, over time, they not only became less coercive but also increasingly pointed in a decommodifying direction, tasking governments to invest more. It would, however, still be wrong to speak of a socialisation of NEG, not just given the decommodifying prescriptions’ weak coercive power but also because of their links to policy rationales that are compatible with NEG’s overarching commodification script. Moreover, Chapter 11 shows that NEG prescriptions tasked governments to channel more public resources into the allegedly more productive sectors (transport and water services) rather than into essential social services like healthcare. Given NEG’s country-specific methodology, it is not surprising that there have been only few instances of transnational action on specific NEG prescriptions. By contrast, the share of transnational labour protests targeting EU interventions broadly defined increased after 2008. This suggests that NEG has been altering protest landscapes.

Chapter 4 first reviews earlier studies of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime and discusses the methodological challenges that they pose for the assessment of NEG documents. Earlier studies of NEG policy prescriptions flattened the semantic relationships between the different terms used in them and the power relations between the actors involved in their production. We therefore outline a novel research design that accounts for the links between the policy orientation of NEG prescriptions and the material interests of concrete social groups as well as the hierarchical ordering of NEG prescriptions in larger policy scripts unevenly deployed across countries, time, and policy areas. We address the first point in Chapter 4 and the second in Chapter 5. In 4.2, we identify commodification as the most relevant dimension for analysing the nexus between EU economic governance and labour politics. In 4.3, we operationalise the concepts of commodification and decommodification in employment relations and public services and outline the analytical framework against which we assess the policy orientation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions in the policy areas of employment relations and public services.

This chapter explores the gendered biopolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic through an analysis of the UK’s marketized higher education sector. Theoretically, we combine feminist political economy with labour market segmentation theory to develop a novel meso-level biopolitical analysis. We use this framework to compare how major labour market institutions – employers, the trade union, and the Government – responded to the pandemic. The analysis reveals that, as a consequence of the actions and interactions of these labour market institutions, different segments of the higher education labour market experienced the pandemic precarities in different ways, resulting in gendered outcomes. The analysis extends our understanding of the genesis of gendered pandemic precarities within the marketized employment system studied.

Central to our argument is that “representation gaps” may be filled to some extent by alliances being built by actors at different points in the supply chain and based on the two different logics of representation: representation as structure and representation as claim. Using the Accord as the empirical context, Chapter 5 analyses how and when representation as claim and representation as structure can become complementary: labour rights NGOs can use their power to agitate and mobilise in ways that empower trade unions to negotiate with global brands, while trade unions provide the legitimacy and access to negotiation with global brands. This complementarity is illustrated by the Bangladesh Accord. The Accord emerged as a negotiated and legally binding agreement between Global Union Federations, NGOs and over 200 brands, providing an unprecedented mechanism of transnational co-determination at the supply chain level between representatives of labour and capital.

This chapter analyzes how work and employment are shaped within a landscape marked by organizational innovation and, more often than not, even by the fundamental transformation of formal organizations. Even large organizations are increasingly adopting what some have called “post-bureaucratic” forms. The post-bureaucratic organizational landscape is marked by three trends with the aim of achieving even more fluidity in organizations: temporariness, plurality, and partiality. With regard to these three aspects, we argue that work and employment, often intermediated with the help of agencies of all sorts, are increasingly integrated in networked processes of interorganizational value creation.