Prospects for a European Labour Market

Since its inception, the European Union has advanced on two fronts: the expansion of its geographical space and the widening of the scope of its powers. With 27 member states today, the Union is a success with regard to free trade. It has also made great strides in terms of economic integration, but its advances in this area are still complicated by the absence, as yet, of a unified social policy, that brief remaining very largely in the hands of the member states. In a context of this kind, what is the current state of the European labour market, which, as we know, relates to both economic and social policies? And are there any prospects of unification?
Florence Lefresne presents a view of Europe’s labour markets here, showing the extent to which European specificity, which is real when the Union is compared with other entities (the United States, Japan etc.), masks great internal diversity (in terms of employment rates, wage policies, unemployment management etc.). She also stresses the diversity that exists in respect of flexibility, pointing out that the most flexible countries do not systematically perform the best in employment terms, and that training schemes and unemployment insurance provision have a key role to play in the efficiency of labour markets.
On the basis of this analysis, she goes on to discuss the issues surrounding the mobility of European workers and, in particular, the real risks of social dumping in a union of individual states that still have very disparate developmental levels and social models. She assesses the European Employment Strategy, showing that the prevailing situation remains one of a “policy mix”, with its attendant danger of a “race for the bottom”, whereas the positive solution for a more homogeneous operation of European labour markets can indisputably be said to lie in “upward convergence”, which requires the prior definition of a European social model.