European Trade Union Confederation In The European Social Model

With the development of European integration, European politicians and scholars consider the European Social Model (ESM) as the new direction of European Union governance in order to cope with all sorts of external and internal challenges. This paper tends to analyze the unique function of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) in constructing the European Social Model by summing up its institutional framework, political opinion, challenges faced and changing roles it plays in social dialogue as the social partner representing the rights and interests of laborers in Europe. The paper is divided into four parts as follows.The first section is the introductory part. It mainly introduces the significance of this paper, status quo at home and abroad, as well as the major research methods in this article. Meanwhile, the related concepts are also explained in this section. The European Trade Union Confederation is the representative of the 60 million workers in Europe which has been working hard in safeguarding worker's collective interests and constructing a "Social Europe" since it established in 1973. The concept of the Europe Social Model can be understood in two aspects. First, the ESM is defined as a set of common values and it is designated as an alternative to the American pure-market form of capitalism. The basic idea of the ESM is that economic growth is to be combined with social cohesion. Secondly, the ESM is also a European project. In such a political process, European institutions, political parties, interests groups, and social partners decide policies together, and work hard for "European identity".The second section is to discuss the role the ETUC plays in constructing the ESM. The social dialogue is the regulatory mode of the ESM and its concept has a broad sense and narrow sense, by which the ETUC has chances to influence or determine the social policy-making process in European Union. At the same time, the role and function of the ETUC are varied in different decision-making mechanisms which contain "community method", "social partnership procedure" and then "open method of coordination".The third section is mainly about the challenges the ETUC faces. The era of globalization and the EU enlargement have proposed the new challenges to the development of the ETUC which include democracy deficit and atypical work brought by economic globalization and technological progress. All of this has shaken the legitimacy foundation of the social dialogue to a certain extent.The fourth section is to assess the role of the ETUC in constructing the ESM. According to the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen, the capability for work and the capability for voice are the benchmarking of assessment. At the level of principles or objectives, the ESM is perfectly in line with the capability approach, but what actual policies and modes of operation are mobilized in order to make these good intentions come true is still in question.