Language and governance of society. Reflections on the Labour Policy Lexicon of European Institutions

Abstract

Since the Lisbon European Council (2000), increasing the employment rate has taken hierarchical priority among the objectives of the institutions holding labor policy responsibilities. However, this direction coexists with the ECB’s strategy of maintaining a high unemployment rate for the purpose of countering the phenomena of monetary instability prescribed by Article 127 of the Treaty. This paper argues that, behind this convoluted institutional communication device, there is actually an intent to increase labor market participation for the purpose of disciplining wage dynamics. It is also argued that in order to provide appropriate incentives for labor force mobilization, EU institutions have used two different instruments depending on the institutional specificities of individual countries. In countries with a system of social security with a high degree of coverage, activation to work has relied on the establishment of a synallagmatic link between the disbursement of benefits and the assumption of a commitment by beneficiaries to actively search for work. In contrast, in countries without generalized anti-poverty programs such as Italy, the focus has been on squeezing pension spending, «guilty» of feeding a fabric of family-based social insurance micro-agencies that supposedly distort labor supply