Acceso usuarios
Claire Kilpatrick
Sovereign debt crisis measures are a new and highly significant source of social norms in the EU. Demands for rapid scale consolidation and structural reform have created a cascade of social instructions which have been particularly pointed and precise in those seven member states which have received or are receiving EU bail-outs (in order of their first bailout: Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus). A good case can be made that the bailout measures, alongside the revamped macro-economic governance processes, are the most important social sources in the EU's history: in their extensive scope, their extraordinary detail, and in their rapid execution. Yet few would have anticipated that this EU contribution to national labour and social law would have been so sharply and insistently de-regulatory. Driven by the imperatives of rapid scale consolidation and structural reform, there have been: extensive cuts to, or limitations in who can access, health and education provision; reduced access to and levels of pensions and other social benefits; reductions in the size and pay of the public sector; a decentralising and dismantling of collective bargaining; cuts to minimum wages and related employ
