Collective bargaining in a time of crisis

Abstract

The magnitude of the deterioration in economic conditions since mid-2008, and the consequences for employment and employment conditions, are unprecedented in the post-war era in western Europe. Likewise, they are unknown in central and south-east Europe since the economic upheaval that accompanied the post-communist transition twenty years ago. In the present paper we consider the capacity of collective negotiators across the EU to frame and agree measures which respond to the challenges thrown up by the financial and economic crisis. Three main questions arise. First, what has been the incidence and character of negotiated responses at different, inter-sector, sector and company, levels? The prominence or otherwise of collectively agreed measures provides a critical indication of the continued robustness of collective bargaining as a central mode of labour market governance in (most of) Europe’s social models. The character of agreements refers to the substantive measures, in the form of collective goods, provided as protection against uncertainty, but also to the (re)distribution of uncertainty involved and to procedural innovations. Second, what factors influence the cross-country and cross-sector pattern in terms of the incidence and the nature of crisis-response agreements? Four types of factors will be posited as potentially relevant: economic conditions; public policy; industrial relations institutions; and employer and trade union strategies. Third, what might be the medium-term implications of the crisis, both substantively and procedurally, for collective bargaining? The impact of the crisis may have served to reinforce existing trajectories, towards greater prominence of employment as a focus of substantive trade-offs (Leonard, 2001) and, procedurally, towards greater decentralisation of collective bargaining (Marginson and Sisson, 2004; Visser, 2005), or it may have prompted new directions of travel.

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