Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration, Employment Relations and Just Transition

ongoing

The proposed Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration, Employment Relations and Just Transition will explore the challenges and possibilities that the EU’s shift to a new economic governance (NEG) regime – in response to the financial crisis, Covid pandemic, technological and climate change – pose to employment relations. Thus, the action pursues the following objectives: 1. To deepen students’ understanding of the EU’s NEG regime and its implications for prosperity, sustainability, just transition, democracy and social dialogue. Our Irish, European, American and Asian students have only limited exposure to EU integration studies, even though employment relations are increasingly affected by EU interventions. We aim to strengthen the European dimension in the curriculum of our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes with our partners from Cornell and the European Masters in Labour Studies consortium of leading universities in the field. 2. To open up new approaches that go beyond methodological nationalism in employment relations. This will allow us to capture the European integration processes at work. We propose a corresponding research programme, international PhD seminar, and an international lecture series. This will lead to book and journal publications with leading scholarly publishers in English, German, Italian and Romanian. 3. To involve EU-level employment relations practitioners and EU officials in our teaching activities to facilitate students’ active learning. We will organise annual fieldtrips to EU institutions, Business Europe, the ETUC in Brussels and the tripartite EU agency Eurofound in Dublin. 4. To raise employment relations practitioners’ awareness of EU governance and its workings in different areas of employment relations. Thus, we will also publish outreach articles in English, French, German, and Italian. 5. To promote EU integration studies to a position of eminence in the UCD School of Business.