Subsidiarity and Social Europe

In addition to cross national differences in political economy, EU member states have developed distinctive social policy programmes that may provide tangible and immediate benefits to employers. Social policies may create indirect and strong institutional advantages to employers, developing positive synergies between social policy and economic policy. For example, by providing unemployment benefits during economic downturns, sickness or disability, social policies allow workers to reject jobs that do not correspond to their skills. In this way, social policy supports the investments employers make in training and upgrading the skills of their workers.