Labour Law and Social Policy

Abstract

Labour law and social policy are sometimes perceived as somewhat peripheral areas of the European integration project, areas that do ‘not enjoy the same status as the economic strand of internal market law’. Armstrong, elaborating on the scholarship of Scharpf, and Joerges and Rödl, recalls that the original constitutional ‘social deficit’ ‘was not … a design flaw as such but rather an understanding of the relative roles of the EU and nation states’. As argued by Giubboni, in the eyes of its founders, the EU/EEC was to have been primarily tasked with the (liberal) economic and market integration of the participating states, so as to increase their overall economic prosperity and endow the national welfare states with the resources necessary to perform their key redistributive tasks. Almost without fail, specialist textbooks recall the paucity and lack of enforceability of the social policy provisions contained in the Treaty of Rome, often noting that ‘the first steps to European Labour’ occurred ‘in spite of the Treaty’, that is to say in the absence of clear law-making powers, that only started emerging with the Treaty of Maastricht and, more markedly, with the Treaty of Amsterdam. To this day, political scientists add to this,