作者: Slavina Spasova , Dalila Ghailani , Sebastiano Sabato , Stéphanie Coster , Boris Fronteddu
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摘要: The lockdown and other restrictive measures introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic recession have had a strong impact on labour markets worldwide. As far as the European Union (EU) is concerned, the accelerated fall in total employment was the ‘sharpest decline ever observed over two successive quarters since 1995’(European Commission 2020a: 20). Unemployment, however, decreased moderately over 2020, although to differing extents in individual Member States and at different paces during the various lockdown phases (ibid: 7). This exceptional and unpredictable context puts the pivotal role of social protection squarely in the spotlight, reminding policymakers and citizens of the essential role of strong social security to cushion against potential disastrous social impacts and job destruction. Various job retention schemes have played an important role as automatic stabilisers to preserve millions of jobs (OECD 2020a; Müller and Schulten 2020; European Commission 2020a).At the same time, the consequences of the pandemic also highlighted that–to rephrase George Orwell’s expression–‘all workers are equal, but some workers are more equal than others’ regarding their access to social protection. The Covid-19 pandemic severely affected some categories of non-standard workers1 and the selfemployed (Eurofound 2020 a, b; ESPN 2020; Causa and Cavalleri 2020; OECDc). The crisis hit labour markets hard at a time when, for decades now and especially since the Great Recession, there has been a gradual unravelling of labour laws in the name of flexibility. Indeed, the growing interest in the social …