Philippa Watson, EU SOCIAL AND EMPLOYMENT LAW: POLICY AND PRACTICE IN AN ENLARGED EUROPE Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2009. xl + 538 pp. ISBN 9781904501534. £95.
| Pages | 493-495 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2011.0068 |
| Author | Diamond Ashiagbor |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
The EU has long been marked by a somewhat unstable compromise between the market and the social, between free market principles on the one hand – in particular the completion of the EU internal market – and on the other, support for national labour law and social welfare systems. EU social and employment law thus seeks to bridge these two, possibly competing, dimensions of the EU integration project. This monograph, by academic and barrister Philippa Watson is her second, following a book on EU social security law in the 1980s. In this work, Watson adopts a broad canvass: examining both law and policy in the social and employment fields (3). The book is divided into seven parts: General; Social Policy; Employment Policy; Individual Employment Rights; and three parts on Equality of Treatment – with regard to Men and Women; Race; and Religion, Disability, Age and Sexual Orientation.
The book was published just prior to the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty in December 2009, and accordingly makes reference to pre-Lisbon provisions of the EC Treaty and the Treaty on European Union (and pre-Lisbon numbering). Nevertheless, the book remains a valuable resource, in particular as it integrates discussion of content of the Treaty of Lisbon (which was in its final form, signed but not yet ratified at time of publication), acknowledging that once ratified, Lisbon will raise the status of social policy within the foundational instruments of the EU (517), affirming social policy as an area of “shared competence” between the EU and the Member States.
The Introduction contains a truncated history of the evolution of competence for, and content of, social and employment policy from the Treaty of Rome onwards (3–6), though Watson returns to this issue of the historical development for a full chapter – chapter 3. Here, she tells a familiar story with clarity: from the 1956 Ohlin Report and its influence on the shape of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the first Social Action Programme in the 1970s, the Single European Act 1986, to the constitutional changes wrought to EU competence over social and employment policy in the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam. As Watson notes, the crucial point of this account of the EU's evolving social dimension is that employment and social policy remain not as ends in themselves but as means to attain economic policy and completion of the internal market (63). Indeed, most “social” policy of the EU is in fact typically employment-related...
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