Suchergebnisse

"Social law and policy have been moving increasingly into the mainstream of the European Union. In recent years there have been important changes to the Treaty framework for enacting social policy,bringing the role of the social partners to the fore. New Treaty provisions for adopting discrimination legislation have highlighted the potential role of the EU in combatting aspects of social exclusion, and in challenging disturbing phenomena such as racism and xenophobia. Social policy is increasingly linked to the emerging notion of Union citizenship. The arrival of the single currency in 1999 is now matched by a more pro-active EU-level policy on employment and the labour market. The analyses in this collection address these and other questions against the backdrop of the longstanding controversies over the nature and scope of EU social policy, including the UKs opt-out from certain provisions between 1993 and 1997, and the ongoing debate about whether EU social policy has, or should have, a social or an economic rationale."--Bloomsbury Publishing

In practice and comments on EU internal market law, the Court and commentators often refer to the notion of 'market access' as if it is the keystone of the EU integration process and as if this would go beyond anti-discrimination rules. However, one cannot go beyond 'non-discrimination without entering the sphere of 'positive action. Yet, there is no legal, political or economic basis for positive action in the internal market context. A comparison with social law, where discrimination is a more developed concept, shows that the arguments for positive action are inappropriate to the economic context and that what are sometimes described as non-discriminatory rules constituting a restriction to free movement in fact usually constitute indirect discrimination. As for market access, economic theory tells us that the only rules that inhibit market access are those that have a discriminatory component. Thus anti-discrimination continues to be the essence of market-making and of market access and talk of 'going beyond' it is mere confusion. The goal and the logic of internal market law is substantive equality for all market actors – similarly to social law, from which it can learn much about the relevant concepts.