The Social Charter of the European Community: A Defeat for European Labor

Abstract

This study examines the failure of the effort by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and its national affiliates to obtain a uniform and binding set of regulations for Europeanwide collective bargaining within the European Community's 1989 Charter of Fundamental Social Rights. The trade unions were prompted to act by the program to create a single European market by the end of 1992. The author argues that labor's weak position economically and politically in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly at the national level, prevented the ETUC and its member confederations from winning support for their version of the Social Charter, since they could neither credibly threaten recalcitrant governments with social unrest nor convincingly offer them electoral aid.

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