The international seminar "The role of labour regulation and social protection systems in meeting the targets of the European Pillar of Social Rights" was held in Cartaxo, Portugal, between February 2 and 5, 2023. It was attended by forty-nine representatives of thirteen workers' organisations from Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Lithuania. The seminar was organized by CFTL (Centro de Formação e Tempos Livres) in cooperation with BASE - Frente Unitária de Trabalhadores (BASE-FUT) with the support of the European Centre for Workers' Affairs (EZA), and funded by the European Union.
The seminar was based on two fundamental findings. The first is the centrality of work in our societies, both as a fundamental source of dignity and as a condition for the reproduction of societies themselves. After more than a century of struggle by workers, the principles that work is not a commodity and that the right to work is a human right were recognized and ratified by European states in the Declaration of Philadelphia of 1944 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
The institutional edifice that makes these principles concrete rests on a tripod: labour law, which recognizes and seeks to mitigate the inequalities inherent in labour relations; the right of workers to form trade unions; and the right to collective bargaining and the principle of the most favourable treatment.
The second observation is that the democratic social state assumes as its essential function the promotion of the well-being of all citizens and is governed by the principle of the dignity of human life. This constituted an epochal break with a minimalist concept of the state - inherent in liberal capitalism - in which the role of the state was reduced to the defence of property and to the physical security of populations. Universal access to social security, a form of social insurance based on the mutualisation of collective risks - unemployment, sickness and old age - is the cornerstone of the realisation of this principle.
The last decades have been marked by the intensification of economic crises, stemming the financialisation of capitalism and on a model that is predatory towards people and the environment. This was aggravated by the inability of states to respond to the changes in the social division of labour, the transnationalisation and complex organisation of companies and the increase in migratory flows of workers – themselves a consequence of the worsening inequalities between North and South and between the centre and the periphery.
As a result, we have been witnessing a degradation of the pillars of labour regulation. The loss of capacity of national states to organize their legal system and the increased complexity inherent in the coexistence of European and national norms create additional difficulties for the action of the institutions responsible for applying labour law norms. On the other hand, labour law has been relegated in relation to rights protecting private property and investment. The weakening of the principle of the most favourable treatment, combined with legislative changes that objectively remove bargaining power from trade unions, such as the expiry of collective agreements in Portugal or the enshrinement in law of forms of contract that allow circumventing union representation, put collective bargaining at risk.
At the same time, policy makers take refuge in the conceptions of a state of exception and austerity, focusing the discourse and policy measures on responding to emergency situations and restricting social policies to minimalist objectives of assistance and almost exclusive focus on situations of extreme poverty. This simultaneously implies the abandonment of objectives promoting social welfare, the dilution of forms of solidarity and the undermining of citizens' trust in the capacity of social security systems.
It is therefore necessary to strengthen the mechanisms of social dialogue at national and European level and to activate the channels of solidarity and cooperation between trade unions and workers' organisations in the European area. It is also necessary to empower workers' organisations to look at labour law as a whole, including soft law - such as codes of conduct and corporate responsibility - taking advantage of and disseminating good practices where they exist. And, at the same time, to be able to use in their favour devices such as competition law in the defence of rights such as strike action and the establishment of minimum services.
In this framework, the involvement of social partners in the design of EU policies - traditionally very weak - may be crucial to the search for a better balance in labour relations. At the same time, the establishment of quantifiable targets - such as collective bargaining coverage rates, unionization rates - in mechanisms to monitor the implementation of policies such as the European Semester may contribute to put back on the national agendas the centrality of the regulation of labour relations and social protection systems.