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 analyses 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. Such VUP Groups are: a) low wage workers; b) solo and bogus self-employed; c) flexible work contracts (fixed-term, agency work, involuntary part-time); d) casual/zero-hours/gig-economy workers.
During its life-span of three years, the WorkYP consortium has produced 29 deliverables that have been disseminated to the scientific community, policy-makers and the general public.
The project has proposed a reconceptualisation of EU citizenship into EU social citizenship and has attached to it a number of entitlements related to social rights.
Several policy proposals have been put forward, addressing both the EU and national legislators, with the aim to tackle in-work poverty from a holistic perspective, thus considering its diverse determinants and causes.
The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has increased societal inequalities but served as testbed for Member states' social legislation. In most countries, financial transfers from the state helped reducing the levels of in-work poverty and shield vulnerable households from sinking into material deprivation. In a post-Covid scenario, still reliable Eurostat data are missing, which does not allow to draw medium-long term conclusions over the efficacy of specific policies tested during the pandemic years.
