Social Europe: What Europe can learn from living-wage campaigns

While the United Kingdom may be leaving the European Union, the UK campaign for a ‘living wage’ has lessons in this regard for the remaining member states—notably in the context of the European Commission’s commitment to introduce an EU-wide legal instrument on minimum wages, in line with the fair-wage provisions of the European Pillar of Social Rights. The campaign brings together employers, unions, researchers and civil-society activists of different stripes to make the case for decent pay for employees at the bottom of the pay ladder. [...]

Statutory minimum wages are not designed to ensure a minimum standard of living. Legal wage floors have multiple objectives, including raising the income of employees on low pay, ensuring a level playing field for all employers and ‘ending exploitative low pay and redressing power imbalances between employers and workers at the lower end of the labour market’. Crucially, these goals need to be achieved with little or no negative employment effects. But the minimum wage is not designed to provide beneficiaries with a minimum acceptable standard of living. The raison d’être of living-wage campaigns is to go this one extra step, based on a detailed costing of what it takes to have a socially acceptable standard of living and to derive a wage from that costing. Campaigns covered in a recent Eurofound review of initiatives worldwide estimated the living wage as anywhere between 13 and 82 per cent higher than the relevant national legal hourly minimum wage. [...]

National minimum wages are blind to growing regional cost-of-living differentials. There is a single statutory minimum wage regime in the UK but there are two distinct living wages based on where one lives. The London living wage is 15 per cent higher than its rest-of-UK equivalent. This underlines the large difference in regional cost of living, notably between larger, more economically dynamic, metropolitan areas and their hinterlands in the same country. The legal minimum wage is likely to be especially inadequate in high-cost cities. This raises sustainability issues for the individual, households and society. The high living costs of cities make it hard for those on low pay to make ends meet. This may also jeopardise labour supply in many services in the public and private sectors, in health and care as well as in retail, hotels and restaurants.

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Social Europe: Democracy, authoritarianism and crises

In the former category, for example, are the Nordic countries. Experts consistently rate these countries’ democracies as strong, while their citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and levels of social trust remain very high. The responses of the region’s governments and societies to the crisis clearly reflect these features. [...]

On the policy front, the Swedish government also quickly announced measures to help citizens and businesses through the crisis, including covering workers’ salaries to avoid layoffs, providing loans, tax holidays and more. As in Denmark, the minority social-democrat government’s ability to pass such policies and its general response to the evolving crisis has been facilitated by the willingness of opposition parties to co-operate in parliament. In Sweden, as in Denmark, the idea that it is the government’s job to protect society and the economy is uncontroversial. [...]

One of the most striking aspects of the initial American response was the deep divergence between elites and citizens over basic facts. Initially, many Republican politicians and much of the right-wing media portrayed the crisis as a ‘hoax’, and the ‘hysteria’ about it a left-wing conspiracy to ‘destabilise the country and destroy’ Donald Trump. One prime-time host on Fox told viewers that concerns about the coronavirus were ‘yet another attempt to impeach the president’. [...]

But it isn’t just the government’s capacity to respond to challenges that has decayed. The willingness of Trump and Republicans even to recognise the need for government action is also lacking. They have used mistrust of ‘big government’—and more generally a rejection of the idea that it is the government’s job to protect society and the economy—as an excuse to reject policies that even conservatives in other countries accept as necessary.

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Social Europe: Europe’s failure to address Covid-19 shows the need for a European ‘health citizenship’

The way the world is organised has proven to be catastrophic for the management of this epidemic. In Europe, each country has reacted in a different way, perhaps revealing the distinct characters of national elites. Germany has managed to keep death rates low with heavy testing, but other European countries have been far slower to react, while some governments appear to have been less open about the situation they were facing and only reacted when the virus was at their doorstep.

Some countries, such as Austria and Poland, have demonstrated nationalist instincts in their responses by closing down their borders. Meanwhile in Spain, the approach has included the centralisation of healthcare responsibilities following the declaration of a state of emergency, even though the relevant expertise is located at the regional level, and some Spanish regions which advocated for a lock down have remained open.

In contrast, In Italy, the regions of Veneto and Lombardy were early movers in setting up a quarantine and urging locals to stay home. In Lombardy, local health authorities established strong containment measures in the initial cluster by quarantining several towns in an attempt to slow transmission of the virus. In Germany, states have taken the lead in fighting the virus, while in the UK Wales and Scotland have acted first by announcing policy measures such as school closures which were then followed by the whole country. [...]

Today, European citizenship is defined by a common European health card as much as a European passport. However, the European role in managing health crises has remained modest. The Covid-19 crisis highlights that public health (the management of global public risks) is an area where the EU should be more proactive. Given the nationalistic and even selfish policies implemented by various member states, the creation of a European wide public-health authority must now be viewed as an urgent matter to consider as part of wider reforms. Being European should entail having a European health citizenship.

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The Guardian: 'Thank you Greta': natural solutions to UK flooding climb the agenda

The UK’s flooding this year is a story of desperation – but also hope, says John Hughes, development manager at Shropshire Wildlife Trust, who works in the valley. Following widespread acceptance of the climate and ecological emergency, Hughes believes people are increasingly looking to nature for solutions. [...]

“I say thanks very much Extinction Rebellion and Greta [Thunberg] – you’ve done a great job. It’s the job we’ve been trying to do for 50 years. We need to take a holistic view – land can do many, many things.”

In the past, flood plains acted like sponges that soaked up water and stopped it flowing headlong into settlements downstream. Wetter habitats provided useful materials such as willow and reeds for baskets and thatched roofs. However, natural wet woodland, neutral grassland, fens and marshes were ironed out of the postwar landscape and now cover just 11% of English and Welsh flood plains. Intensive agriculture covers 70%. [...]

The problem is that reducing food production is currently counterintuitive to most farmers’ business plan, says Dr Marc Stutter, a soil and water scientist at the James Hutton Institute. “The biggest thing we’re fighting against is that the farmers and their fathers and grandfathers have been very proud of the way they’ve brought the land into condition for crops and quite rightfully so. Their parents have spent a lot of effort draining the land and now there’s someone telling them they want pockets of it to be wet up again.

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