In this article, we examine whether (and by how much) workers in Canada have been compensated for the 'novel' risks associated with COVID-19. We create a unique dataset from a system that scores occupations in the US O*NET database for COVID-19 exposure. We then combine those COVID exposure scores with Canadian occupational data contained in the Public Use Microdata File of the Labour Force Survey. This allows us to categorize Canadian occupations based on COVID-19 exposure risk. We find a long-tailed distribution of COVID-19 risk scores across occupations, with most jobs at the lower end of the risk spectrum and relatively few occupations accounting for most of the high COVID-19 exposure risk. We find that workers who are already more vulnerable in the labour market (i.e. youth, women and immigrants) are also more likely to be employed in occupations with high COVID-19 exposure risk. When we look at the relationship between high-COVID exposure risks in occupation and wages, we find negative compensating differentials both at the mean (negative 8%) and across the earnings distribution. However, when workers are covered by a union, they enjoy a sizeable hazard pay premium (11.7% on average) as compared to their non-union counterparts. Furthermore, we find that the moderating effects of unionization for workers at high risk of COVID exposure to be largest at the bottom of the earnings distribution (i.e. the 10th percentile of unionized earners receives a 12.3% risk premium for high-COVID exposure, whereas the 90th percentile receives only a 2%).

In response to the last recession, the European Union (EU) adopted a new economic governance (NEG) regime. An influential stream of EU social policy literature argues that there has been more emphasis on social objectives in the NEG regime in more recent years. This article shows that this is not the case. It does so through an in-depth analysis of NEG prescriptions on wage, employment protection and collective bargaining policy in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania between 2009 and 2019. Our main conclusion is that the EU's interventions in these three industrial relations policy areas continue to be dominated by a liberalization agenda that is commodifying labour, albeit to a different degree across the uneven but nonetheless integrated European political economy. This finding is important, as countervailing transnational trade union action is the more likely, the more there is a common threat. Even so, our contextualized analysis also enables us to detect contradictions that could provide European labour movements opportunities to pursue countervailing action.

We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics that are driving EU politicization and the rising Euroscepticism of workers and unions in the public sphere. One explanation frames the rise in Euroscepticism in cultural terms, emphasizing workers' alleged primordial attachment to their nation. A second uses socioeconomic frames, linking growing Euroscepticism to the increasingly neo-liberal direction of the EU. The weight of these competing frames in the referendum campaigns on the EU Constitution in France and the Lisbon Treaty and the Fiscal Treaty in Ireland cannot be measured easily, as the categorization of a phrase as socioeconomic or cultural is in itself subject to political classification struggles. We therefore presents the findings of an lexical analysis of all , all and all worker- or union-related articles published in almost all national media outlets during the mentioned referendum debates. This was made possible by the software package that allowed us to analyse very large corpuses of articles inductively. Our analysis reveals that socioeconomic terms dominated policy debates in both countries. The findings question existing EU politicization studies that were measuring the salience of different frame types by deductive analysis.