10.6092/issn.1561-8048/15704
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1561-8048
15704
1S
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Silvia Rainone
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Italian Labour Law e-Journal
Editorial
Text.Serial.Journal
https://illej.unibo.it/
15
Editorial
2022-11-03
2022-10-31
2022-11-03
2022-11-03
I-III
ILLeJ
Silvia Rainone
2022/11/03
10.6092/issn.1561-8048/15704
I
European Trade Union Institute
1561-8048
1S
en
III
Editorial
https://illej.unibo.it/article/download/15704/14876
15
    Editorial                                                                     Italian Labour Law e-Journal
    Emanuele Menegatti                                                           Special Issue 1, Vol. 15 (2022)
    e.menegatti@unibo.it                             NextGeneration EU in Action: Impact on Social and Labour
    Silvia Rainone                                                                                      Policies
    srainone@etui.org                                                                          ISSN 1561-8048
                                                                https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1561-8048/15704




                                             Editorial
                       Emanuele Menegatti - Silvia Rainone+


    The NextGenerationEU recovery plan, alongside investments disbursed from the
Union’s long-term budget, represents the largest stimulus package ever financed by the EU.
Designed to address the economic and social disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic,
it involves more than 800 billion euros in grants and loans to support reforms and
investments in the Member States. It encompasses seven financial programmes, the
Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) being by far the largest.
    The social dimension of the RRF is the subject of this special Issue of the Italian Labour
Law e-Journal, which is the product of a joint project with the European Trade Union Institute
(ETUI). It aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the national Recovery and
Resilience Plans (RRP), in which the Member States have been asked to outline how they
plan to invest the funds, in compliance with the targets laid down by the RRF. We believe
that such an extensive review will prove to be a very useful instrument for tracing the course
of European social policy in the wake of the pandemic. It will help us to understand whether
the EU’s complicated governance architecture, enriched by the RRF, may effectively enable
the EU to attain the social and labour policy targets set out in the Porto Declaration and in
the European Pillar of Social Rights; in particular, the creation of more inclusive labour
markets and improved social protection systems, leading to a fairer society.
    In the first three contributions to this special issue, the different aspects of this question
are explored from an EU perspective. In the opening article, Sonja Bekker explains that the
RRF has become part of the EU’s multi-level governance, in which the European and
national players interact with a view to achieving various targets. For its social component, it
is tied to other governance instruments, namely the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR)
and the EU Semester. There are several linkages between the RRF and those instruments.
The fact that conditions attached to the loans and grants included the implementation of the
2019 and 2020 Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs), covering many topics related to
social policy, are an example of this. Another is the inclusion of Pillar principles into RRF
objectives, which have to be taken into account by the Commission when assessing the


 Professor of Labour Law, University of Bologna-Alma Mater Studiorum.
+
 Researcher at the European Trade Union Institute and at the Institute for Labour Law of KU Leuven,
Belgium. Special acknowledgments go to Leonardo Battista and James Patterson for their great editorial work.
Editorial                                                                 Italian Labour Law e-Journal
Emanuele Menegatti, Silvia Rainone                                       Special Issue 1, Vol. 15 (2022)
                                                        NextGeneration EU in Action: Impact on Social
                                                                                    and Labour Policies
                                                                                       ISSN 1561-8048
                                                          https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1561-8048/___

RRPs. This seems to entail a new design for EU governance, involving a different interplay
between its instruments (ruled-based, coordination-based, monetary-based), which can lead
to a new way of developing (better) socioeconomic policies at the national level.
    Francesco Corti, Tomas Ruiz and Alessandro Liscai explore the social dimension of the
NGEU from a social investment perspective. Their contribution shows that, after decades
of underinvestment, especially during the austerity imposed in the wake of the Great
Recession, the RRF has the potential to relaunch public social investment in Europe. The
article shows that this has occurred especially in those Member States with limited fiscal
capacity (Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain), which were also among the states that were
most subject to austerity interventions during the Euro Crisis. The analysis shows that in
these states, RRF resources were largely channelled into new projects. By contrast, the RRF’s
impact on social investments appears to be less strong in states with greater fiscal capacity,
such as Austria and Germany, where the RRF has predominantly targeted investments that
were already in the pipeline. All in all, the study conducted in the article concludes that the
RRF has had a positive effect, as it enabled social investments where past spending cuts had
resulted in infrastructure problems over the years.
    The third 'horizontal' contribution, by Silvia Rainone, evaluates the NGEU from the point
of view of its effectiveness in bringing the Union closer to achieving its social objectives.
This contribution discusses the remarkable novelties introduced by the RRF: enhanced
support for public investments, a different (and more nuanced) approach to macroeconomic
and fiscal conditionality, and the integration of the European Pillar of Social Rights in the
recovery strategy. These elements indicate that the EU has approached the crisis in a
decidedly different way from the years of the Great Recession, this time leaving more space
for redistributive and protective initiatives in the social and labour sphere. The analysis of
the various RRPs, however, shows that the broader room to manoeuvre has not been used
effectively to introduce decommodifying measures, with most of the initiatives aimed at
active labour market policies. As a result, the Union appears better equipped to realise its
targets regarding employment rate growth rather than objectives related to the promotion of
better working conditions and combating poverty and social exclusion.
    The social impact of the RRF is approached in a national perspective in the second section
of the issue, composed by national reports written by national experts in social law. All the
national reports follow an established structure based on the same research questions. After
providing a general framework pointing out the country’s position vis-à-vis the NGEU, the
reports move to an overview of national recovery and resilience plans. They give an account
of the amounts requested in grants and loans and their distribution among the various
reforms and investments proposed. They also point out which of those reforms may have
an impact on the labour market, employment protection, social protection and social
assistance.
    In exploring the social dimension and labour dimensions of the RRPs, the reports
consider the outcomes of the multi-level dialogue between national governments and the EU
institutions. They also investigate the level of commitment of the measures adopted within
the RRP to the principles of the EPSR, the Social Scoreboard, and the 2019 and 2020 CSRs.


https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1561-8048/17504                                                           II
Editorial                                                                 Italian Labour Law e-Journal
Emanuele Menegatti, Silvia Rainone                                       Special Issue 1, Vol. 15 (2022)
                                                        NextGeneration EU in Action: Impact on Social
                                                                                    and Labour Policies
                                                                                       ISSN 1561-8048
                                                          https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1561-8048/___

   Finally, the reports compare the response to the Covid crisis with that to the Great
Recession. It aims to bring out whether and how the NGEU and the RRP have set
management of the economic and financial effects of the current crisis on a different pathway
than during the 2011 Euro Crisis. To that end the reports consider the fiscal and
macroeconomic recommendations in the context of the in-depth reviews carried out by the
Commission since the Covid-19 pandemic occurred (including the 2022 Spring Package) and
their impact on social and employment protection policies. They also investigate other
factors that may be distinct with the former crisis, such as the involvement of social partners
in the elaboration and implementation of the RRP. Some final considerations are then
included in all the reports, seeking traces of an opening towards a growth model in which
social and employment policies are more than merely functionally subordinate to fiscal and
macroeconomic priorities.




Copyright © 2022 Emanuele Menegatti, Silvia Rainone. This article is released under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1561-8048/17504                                                          III
