Still in the background or truly involved? National trade unions and implementation of the national Recovery and Resilience Plans

Abstract

Policy implications:

• Meaningful involvement of domestic stakeholders in the implementation of the national Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRPs) is key to ensuring the legitimacy of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). This is particularly true for social partners, also in light of the European Commission's intention to relaunch social dialogue at both the national and the European level. While the EU is going through multiple transitions and coping with several ‘crises', strong arrangements to ensure meaningful and effective social partner involvement in policymaking are needed more than ever.

• Despite significant cross-country variation, national trade union involvement in the preparation of RRPs in most of the seven countries included in this analysis was far from satisfactory. Some improvement can be found at the implementation stage, although meaningful involvement is often limited to the implementation of specific measures.

• Several shortcomings are still to be addressed to improve involvement in the implementation of the RRPs. These include, first, a mismatch of expectations as to the nature of the involvement process: specific EU guidance in this respect would be useful. Second, both trade union organisations and national administrations should be provided with sufficient resources to be able to engage in a meaningful dialogue under constant time pressure, during RRP implementation.

Keywords: social policy ; economic recovery ; trade union role ; EU policy ; national level ; EU countries