Memo

Memo to the commissioner responsible for employment and social rights

Publishing date: 04 September 2024
Authors: Duygu Güner David Pinkus

Social and labour market policies in the European Union are primarily the responsibility of member states, leading to varying approaches. Your job is to foster convergence through legislation, financial and technical support, and coordination of best practices. Despite considerable progress, the EU has yet to meet the 2030 targets for employment rates, adult training and poverty reduction.

The major social policy challenge you will face include transforming labour markets, skills and labour shortages, balancing pension sustainability with adequacy and meeting the increasing demand for long-term care. To address these issues, you must collaborate with member states to improve labour-market conditions for all workers, support the reform of pension systems, support measures to increase the supply of long-term care, fund research into healthy ageing and enhance data collection for better policymaking.

Key actions:

Focus on wages, working conditions and technology
Assess pension, healthcare and long-term care policy
Push for better data

Read the full memo by clicking the download button at the top of this page.

About the authors

Duygu Güner

Duygu joined Bruegel in June 2022 as part of the Future of Work and Inclusive Growth team.

She is an applied economist, and her research mainly focuses on structural labour markets issues such as barriers to labour force participation, gender gaps, informality, skill shortages and unemployment.

Before joining Bruegel, she has been actively involved in research for more than 10 years in a diverse setting. She participated in multiple projects for various institutions including JRC-Seville, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, and the Ministry of Labour and Social Security of Turkey.

She holds an MA in Economics and a BSc in Management Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (Turkey). Currently, she is finalising a PhD in Economics at KU Leuven.
David Pinkus

David Pinkus joined Bruegel as an Affiliate fellow in May 2023. He is an applied economist with a strong interest in social welfare policies, as well as the intersection of financial markets and the real economy.

His work focuses on the challenges social security systems face due to an ageing population. He is also interested in the wider economic effects of funded pension systems and institutional investors. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a consultant at the OECD’s Long-Term Investment Project, researching policies to enable institutional investors to finance infrastructure under a G20 mandate.

David holds a PhD in Economics from Copenhagen Business School and is affiliated with the university’s Pension Research Centre (PeRCent). David also holds an M.Sc. in Economics from Bocconi University in Milan and a B.Sc. in Economics from Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.

David is fluent in German, French and English.