In EU governance, the teaching profession is affected by education as well as employment policy. The key interest of this paper is the unfolding relationship between the two policy domains over the last decades, with the entry point being social dialogue between teacher unions, government, and employers at the European scale. In doing so, this paper aspires to make a contribution to an area of study which deserves much further consideration. Whilst there is a substantial research literature on the main education policy actors with transnational horizons of action, such as the European Union, the World Bank, UNESCO, and the OECD, as well as private sector actors, the literature is sparse on the roles and capacities of teacher unions in the global education policy field. This is remarkablegiven the increased political attention directed towards teaching and teachers over the last decades in Europe and beyond (Paine et al. 2016). Based on an empirical material of policy documents and ten semi-structured interviews with policy actors, the paper traces the elaboration of institutional arrangements for social dialogue and consultation with teacher unions that has taken place in EU governance since the 1990s. The paper draws on the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), and its elaborations for the study of transnational governance (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006, Dubois 2015, Lingard and Rawolle 2004, Lingard et al. 2005). More specifically, the paper adopts the approach suggested by Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangez (2015) that enable the analysis of a field as a distinct set of relations unfolding over time and with varying degrees of relative autonomy. Accordingly, the paper maps the symbolic orders and relative positions of the European Trade Union Committee for Education, the European Federation of Education Employers, and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, as well as the Directorate-General for Education and Culture. Our argument is two-fold. First, social dialogue in EU governance is not merely a matter of re-scaling national arrangements but constitutes new distinctive forms of governance. Second, social dialogue and consultation with teacher unions in EU governance indicates the strengthened coordination across political domains, especially under the Europe 2020 Strategy.

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