The EU Minimum Wage Directive: To Be or Not to Be?

The year began dramatically for Social Europe. On 14 January, Nicholas Emiliou, one of the European Union’s Advocates General, advised the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to annul the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive (AMWD). His opinion supported an action for annulment brought by the Kingdom of Denmark against the European Parliament and the Council, arguing that the AMWD would undermine the rights of national social partners and breach the principle of conferral of powers. In this guest post, Roland Erne discusses these developments.

The Betrayal of Ukraine

When the betrayal came, it was swift and brutal. Donald Trump, having barely started his second presidency, phoned up Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, on Wednesday 12 February and paved the way towards negotiations to end the war without consulting Ukraine itself (BBC, 13 February 2025). When only a week later, high-ranking delegations of both countries including Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met in Riyadh/Saudi Arabia for extensive discussions, no Ukrainian representative was at the table (BBC, 18 February 2025). At the same time, ‘White House officials told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to the US’ (The Guardian, 20 February 2025). This was presented as a way to pay back all the assistance the US had provided over the course of the war.

The public humiliation of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting in the White House was the final confirmation that the US had dropped its support for Ukraine. Denounced by many European leaders and commentators for what it is, a betrayal, this was not, however, the first betrayal of Ukraine. The country has been betrayed by the West on several occasions before, leaving it now in a perilous situation. In this blog post, I will discuss previous moments of betrayal taking a much longer historical perspective.

The Holocaust, Gaza and lessons from history: Genocide runs deep in German society!

Germany prides itself for the way the country has owned up to past atrocities of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 and here in particular the Holocaust, in which six million Jews but also Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, and disabled people were murdered. The Holocaust represents ultimate evil, and its teaching became mandatory from the 1970s, 1980s onwards. In this blog post, I will reflect on Germany’s and the Germans’ attempts to atone for the Holocaust in particular in relation to the country’s support for Israel, drawing also on my own experiences in the German school system.

 

What political economy approach for the 21st century?

In my latest open access article Confronting Multiple Global Crises: a political economy approach for the 21^st century, published in the journal Globalizations, I discuss the essential features of a political economy approach, which facilitates the conceptualisation of the internal relations between the current, multiple global crises including a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology.

 

Beyond Intersectional Political Economy

Adam D. Morton's and my latest article, entitled ‘The Dialectical Matrix of Class, Gender, Race’ published in Environment and Planning F, goes beyond intersectional studies on the themes of class, gender, and race to assert Marxist dialectics in the analysis of capitalist, patriarchal, and racial forms of oppression. Understanding the ways in which these forms are internally related is of utmost importance, considering heightened global tensions within the polycrisis reflected in the conditions characteristic of genocide in Gaza; or the wider global femicide; or the intensifying crisis of global capitalism.

Fighting for a Free Palestine: What we can do in the UK!

With the genocide in Gaza still ongoing and Israel plunging the whole Middle East into war, solidarity with the Palestinian people is more important than ever. The University and College Union (UCU) joined other trade unions and organisations in the UK to call for a Workplace Day of Action on 10 October ‘Ceasefire Now – Stop Arming Israel’. To mark this day, UCU at the University of Nottingham hosted an online talk by Angie Mindel, the secretary of Nottingham Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and treasurer of Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) as well as a retired member of the National Education Union. This guest post is the written version of her talk discussing not only Israeli atrocities, but also what we in the UK can do in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Zero-Hour Contracts Keep Us Precarious

Zero-hour contracts are often toted as a win-win, one where the worker and employer can both benefit and “decide” how much they work. In reality, Niamh Illiff writes in this guest post, this flexibility is a myth – one that benefits employers, not workers. These contracts gift employers with all the power, deciding how many hours to offer while workers are left in a constant state of uncertainty, never knowing how much they’ll earn from week to week. The employer - worker power dynamic is not ‘equalised’ under zero-hour contracts, but exacerbated, representing a heightened form of exploitation leaving workers vulnerable, with little control over their employment practise or financial stability.