Chapter 12 shows that the Covid-19 emergency and the ensuing suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and its sanctioning mechanisms in 2020 led to crucial changes in the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime. For example, the transnational distribution of EU funds, institutionalised by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) Regulation in 2021, meant that the post-Covid NEG regime no longer mimicked the divisive beggar-thy-neighbour tools that transnational corporations use to steer their subsidiaries and workforce. Even so, EU executives continue to direct the post-Covid NEG regime without much participation by national parliaments and the European parliament or unions and social movements. Instead of using the financial sanctions of the suspended SGP, EU executives use the policy conditionalities attached to RRF funding to reach their objectives, which are in keeping with the overarching commodification script.

In Chapter 13, we provide a preliminary analysis of the policy orientation of the EU’s post-Covid-19 new economic governance (NEG) regime to give policymakers, unionists, and social-movement activists an idea about possible future trajectories of EU governance of employment relations and public services. We do that on the basis of not only the recently adopted EU laws in these two policy areas, such as the decommodifying Minimum Wage Directive, but also EU executives’ post-Covid-19 NEG prescriptions in two areas (employment relations, public services), three public sectors (transport services, water services, healthcare services), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania). Vertical NEG interventions in national wage policies paradoxically cleared the way for the decommodifying EU Minimum Wage Directive by effectively making wage policy an EU policymaking issue, but, in the area of public services, we see an accentuation of the trend of NEG prescriptions in recent years: more public investments but also much more private sector involvement in the delivery of public services.