In recent years new or experimental approaches to governance in the EU, namely the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), have attracted great interest and controversy. This book examines the European Employment Strategy (EES) and its implementation through the OMC, exploring the promises and limitations of the EES for EU social law and policy and for the safeguard of social rights. This significant and timely work offers new insights and fresh perspectives into the operation of New Governance and its relationship with both European and national law and constitutionalism. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in European law – specifically in the field of EU employment law and gender equality – and European governance studies in general.

This text presents a legal study of the European Union's strategy to combat unemployment. It draws on labour law and economic theories of labour market regulation to chart the evolution of the European Union employment strategy and the new forms of governance to which it has given rise.

Büchs analyses the goals and instruments of the Open Method of Coordination, discusses approaches which theorize its functioning, examines its policy content and develops a framework for its evaluation. Through the examination of a case study the author demonstrates how policy actors apply the OMC in employment in Germany and the United Kingdom.

This book examines the European Strategy for Employment (EES) and its implementation through the Open Method of Coordination, exploring what the EES reveals about recent developments in EU social governance, and offering new insights and fresh perspectives into the operation of New Governance and its relationship with law and constitutionalism.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: 1,7, University of Regensburg (Institut fur Politikwissenschaften), course: "New Governance" in der Beschaftigungspolitik, 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The Barcelona Council in March 2002 confirmed that full employment was the overarching goal of the EU and called for a reinforced Employment Strategy to fortify the Lisbon Strategy. The European Employment Strategy (EES) was to be aligned more closely to the Lisbon goal of sustained economic growth, more and better jobs and greater social cohesion by 2010. The EES initiated a new working method at EU level, which was to become known as the "Open Method of Coordination" (OMC). In contrast to binding legal norms, this method is based on the voluntary cooperation of the MS and the principles of mutual learning and subsidiarity. Unlike the requirements of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) with elements of "hard governance," the EES relies on "soft governance." The competences of the MS in the range of employment and social affairs remain untouched. Following the theory of Fritz Scharpf, the effectiveness of policy measures on EU- level depends on the willingness and the ability of national governments to bring in their own resources of legitimacy for the implementation of decisions on European level. The EES itself depends largely on the readiness of the MS to implement the policy measures proposed, as there are not envisioned any financial penalties when not reaching the targets. Subsequent, I try to adumbrate the implementation of the EES in Spain and Portugal starting from a short survey of the economic background on the basis of the Council's recommendations and the NAPs of 2004. I aim to expose the reaction of the national governments on the recommendations. Furthermore, I allude to the linkage between the ESF and the EES and the involvement of the social partners in

The creation of Monetary Union marked a major step in the evolution of the European Union. Is the EU now taking the next step of deeper integration towards a fully-fledged economic government? The book seeks to answer this question by studying the evolution, execution and performance of new modes of economic policy co-ordination as potential stepping-stones towards more institutionalized forms of economic governance.

Europe and the United States confront common challenges in responding to the transformations of work and welfare in the 'new economy'. This volume examines new approaches to the governance of work and welfare in the EU and the US, surveys emergent trends and reflects on future possibilities.

New approaches to governance have attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have identified, charted and evaluated the rise and spread of forms of governance, forms which seem to differ from previous regulatory and legal paradigms. In Europe, the emergence of the Open Method of Coordination has provided a focal point for new governance studies. In the US, scholarship on issues such as collaborative problem-solving, democratic experimentalism, and problem-solving courts exemplify the interest in similar developments. This book covers diverse policy sectors and subjects, including the environment, education, anti-discrimination, food safety and many others. While some chapters concentrate on the operation of new governance mechanisms in a federal and multilevel context and others look at the relationship between public and private mechanisms and settings, what all the contributors share in common is the pursuit of effective mechanisms for addressing complex social problems, and the challenges they raise for our understanding of law and constitutionalism, and of legal and constitutional values.

Within the framework of the new European economic governance, neoliberal views on wages have further increased in prominence and have steered various reforms of collective bargaining rules and practices. As the crisis in Europe came to be largely interpreted as a crisis of competitiveness, wages were seen as the core adjustment variable for ‘internal devaluation’, the claim being that competitiveness could be restored through a reduction of labour costs. This book proposes an alternative view according to which wage developments need to be strengthened through a Europe-wide coordinated reconstruction of collective bargaining as a precondition for more sustainable and more inclusive growth in Europe. It contains major research findings from the CAWIE2 – Collectively Agreed Wages in Europe – project, conducted in 2014–2015 for the purpose of discussing and debating the currently dominant policy perspectives on collectively-bargained wage systems under the new European economic governance.

In Europe, work has long been a symbol of full citizenship and today work is a fundamental goal of European social policy. However, although every person has the ‘right’ to work, it is becoming clearer all the time that unemployment is not due merely to a lack of encouragement to exercise this right, but (at least in part) to some deeper defects in the implementation of effective employment policies. As a contribution to defining the nature of these problems this important collection of essays targets the phenomena of multilevel governance, both vertical (European, national, regional, local) and horizontal (administrative institutions, trade unions, business representatives, NGOs), showing, with detailed analysis and data, how coordination or conflict between the various levels advances, or fails to advance, the goals of employment policy. Regarding the EU, five EU Member States are examined– plus, for comparative analysis, the parallel Canadian federal model – with the authors addressing such concrete issues as: the impact of globalisation and Europeanisation on employment policies; distribution of tasks in the Open Method of Coordination (OMC); involvement of private and economic agents; the increasing significance of international political agents; flexicurity as an employment strategy; the difficulty of integrating the excluded; coordination with education and fiscal policies; social inclusion from the point of view of international human rights; and gender ‘mainstreaming’ as a weakening of the EU guarantee of gender equality. The essays originated in a research meeting held at the Instituto Internacional de Sociología Jurídica at Oñati (Spain) in June of 2007. Some of the contributors, all employment law experts, discuss problematic aspects of the European Employment Strategy (EES) and its influence on the decentralization of employment policies and related elements of social protection. Other authors concentrate on ‘built-in’ multilevel problems resulting from existing constitutional and administrative structures, while a third group focuses on substantive approaches to employment policies within individual member states. The Bulletin contains updated versions of all papers. In this book the degree of administrative, legal, political, and cultural intricacy involved in a serious engagement with multilevel governance of employment on the European model is put on full view. As a deeply informed analysis of how the idea of multilevel governance has played out within the political and administrative reality of Member States, the book will prove of enormous value to labour and employment law professionals anywhere, as the problems identified here have a global reach.