The project Working and Yet Poor (WorkYP) is focused on the increasing social trend of working people at risk or below the poverty line. The Consortium will devote its research to explore the reasons of such phenomenon and elaborate recommendations to the EU and MSs legislators, to enhance the goals proclaimed in the European Pillar of Social Rights. The WorkYP Project will analyse seven representative Countries (Sweden, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and Poland), selected on the basis of their geographical area, as well as their different social systems and legal orders. In each such Country, the WorkYP Project has identified four clusters of particularly Vulnerable and Underrepresented Persons (VUP Groups), which disadvantaged conditions impede full enjoyment of EU citizenship. Attenuating divergent trends across Europe will effectively prevent the risk of social dumping and reduce economic shocks. Only tackling vertically the vulnerabilities of VUPs and attenuating inequalities across diverging regimes will grant EU citizens, mostly those who do not circulate, regaining confidence in public governance and substantiating their citizenry’s status.

Four megatrends - technological transformations, globalisation, climate warming and demographic changes - reshape labour markets, redefine opportunities and risks, and pose new challenges for welfare states in the EU. WeLaR aims to fill knowledge gaps about these processes by pursuing two main goals: (i) provide a comprehensive and comparative diagnosis of the effects on megatrends on labour market risks and challenges for welfare states; (ii) develop policy recommendations to adapt welfare states. WeLaR contributes to the destination’s goal of promoting inclusive growth, fair distribution of its productivity gains, and boosting economic and social resilience. In measuring effects, we account for interactions between megatrends, and disentangle their impacts of on labour supply, labour demand, and labour market allocations, which are also shaped by institutions. We pay particular attention to groups that often face higher labour market risks: women, young workers, people in atypical jobs or in in-work poverty. In developing policy proposals, we combine simulations with lessons from recent welfare state interventions and social innovation experiments, while accounting for political economy of reforms. We use an interdisciplinary approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods and adopts a cross-country perspective, covering the entire EU, which allows us to understand the role of country-specific institutional settings for the effects of megatrends and challenges for welfare states. To ensure relevance of policy ideas, we engage in extensive consultations and set up feedback loops with stakeholders, which complement and validate the quantitative and qualitative studies. These stakeholder consultations help to develop concrete policy proposals aimed at resilient, inclusive growth. We deliver research papers and policy briefs. To maximise WeLaR’s impact, we disseminate the lessons learned and policy proposals to policy-makers, stakeholders and the public.

In 2013, as a response to rising inequalities, poverty and distrust in the EU, the Commission launched a major endeavour to rebalance economic and social policies with the Social Investment Package (SIP). RE-InVEST aims to strengthen the philosophical, institutional and empirical underpinnings of the SIP, based on social investment in human rights and capabilities. Our consortium is embedded in the ‘Alliances to Fight Poverty’. We will actively involve European citizens severely affected by the crisis in the co-construction of a more powerful and effective social investment agenda with policy recommendations. This translates into the following specific objectives: 1. Development of innovative methodological tools for participative research, involving mixed teams of researchers, NGO workers and people from vulnerable groups in the co-construction of knowledge on social policy issues; 2. Diagnosis of the social damage of the crisis in terms of (erosion of) human rights, social (dis)investment, loss of (collective) capabilities; 3. Analysis of the relationships between the rise of poverty and social exclusion, the decline of social cohesion and trust, and the threats to democracy and solidarity in the EU; 4. Development of a theoretical model of social investment, with a focus on the promotion of human rights and capabilities; 5. Application of this model to active labour market policies and social protection: evaluation of policy innovations through qualitative and quantitative analyses; 6. Application of the same model to public intervention in five selected basic service markets: water provision, housing, early childhood education, health care and financial services, through qualitative and quantitative analyses; 7. Analysis of the macro-level boundary conditions for successful implementation of the SIP; 8. Capacity building in civil society organisations for the promotion of the European social investment agenda, through networking and policy recommendations.