'Miracle'by Consensus? Consensualism and Dominance in Dutch Employment Development

Abstract

The impressive increase in employment in the Netherlands since 1985 is widely disued. In the country itself a 'model disourse has developed which presents this success as a result of a consensus between capital and labour to (drastically) restrain wages. The consensuLs is considered to be based on a process of social learning by the uLnions. The c ausal nexus between wage restraint and employment gowth turns out to be doubtful, however. Other processes seem to have been more relevant for the latter, and thc question is what the Dutch u-nions had to lean and why they should have consented to the wage restraint formula. The histoncal evidence suggests that until the late 19 8Os the u-nions, alth ough they de facto acqUiesed to wage rstraint, had different views and that explicit capital labour consensus only became established uneqllivocally when the employment 'miracle'bwame obvious in the mid-i 9%Os. With respet to the 1 90Os, the unions'behaviour should rather be interpreted as submission to the dominant interpretation of the general interest. Changing power relations and the very mechanism of Dutch consensualism pushed them to do so.

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