How European pressure is destroying national collective bargaining systems
Collective agreements that extend beyond the immediate workplace or company level are rightly seen as one of the unique institutional features of the European social model. No other world region has any comparably well-developed system of multi-employer collective bargaining in which agreements cover not only entire industries but in some cases apply even nationally. The existence of collective agreements with such extensive coverage is one of the reasons why a clear majority of employees continue to be covered by collective bargaining in Europe. By contrast, in countries and regions in which the predominant level of bargaining is at the workplace or company, only a minority of employees have their employment conditions secured by collective agreement.
Although the past two decades have seen a shift to a greater decentralisation of collective bargaining in Europe, the core features of multi-employer collective agreements have remained remarkably stable in most European countries. In Western Europe, only the UK, beginning in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, has undergone a fundamental change from a system in which industry level bargaining played a major part to one that is overwhelmingly characterised by workplace bargaining. After 1990, the UK was joined by a number of Eastern European countries in which it has not been possible to construct a system of industry or national level bargaining. However, aside from these cases, multi-employer collective agreements, embracing a number of workplaces or even sectors, have remained the dominant constitutive feature of collective bargaining in Europe. However, against a background of deep economic crisis, an increasing number of European countries are now moving towards a radical decentralisation of collective bargaining, characterised by direct state intervention into free collective bargaining, that is leading to the destruction of long-standing structures of national and industry negotiation. In almost all cases, the driving force behind these developments has been the so-called ‘Troika’ of the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has linked the granting of loans or purchasing of government bonds to the implementation of extensive ‘structural reforms’, especially of the labour market. Download the full Report here
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