This year's Employment and Social Development Review provides a broad overview of the challenges facing the European Union over the coming years as it slowly emerges from the worst recession in its history. It highlights the scale of the challenges, but also the benefits of continuing to invest in education, training and a wider labour market and social policies alongside the actions being taken to restore economic growth in the light of the Union's 2020 employment and social goals.

The report Benchmarking Working Europe 2014 reviews the crisis and EU austerity policies in the last five years from the point of view of Europe's social agenda. The publication, written by the research team of the ETUI, offers an overview of the most important statistics on the EU’s macroeconomic situation, labour market developments, inequality and poverty, deregulation of labour law, wages and collective bargaining, health and safety at work, worker participation rights and the impact of austerity on the green agenda. The Benchmarking Working Europe report comprises a critical, fact-based diagnosis of the first five years of the EU’s crisis management policies in view of the Europe 2020 agenda. It suggests that Europe finds itself “half-way through a lost decade” and provides the scientific underpinning of the ETUC’s political roadmap for a ‘new path for Europe’. The publication demonstrates that the European Union is in need of a fundamental change of course.

Provides a comprehensive analysis of challenges facing the EU in the areas of both employment and social policy. Focuses on changes in Europe's job structure, recent increases in income inequalities, the varying patterns of poverty and social exclusion, the problem of in-work poverty, challenges and measures in the area of active ageing, and brings an updated analysis of intra-EU labour mobility.