Abstract
Welcome to the 21st year of the European Journal of Industrial Relations. The articles included in this issue provide excellent illustrations of the insights which can be gained from cross-national comparative analysis, one of the Journal’s enduring commitments.
Valeria Pulignano and Maarten Keune advance the debate on the contested meanings and implications of flexicurity by shifting the focus from national labour markets to company-level processes. They examine the interaction between employment flexibility and employment security in multinational company subsidiaries in four European countries. The diversity of outcomes within each country indicates the limits of purely national institutional determinants. In part, the differences reflect distinctive product markets, in part also the micropolitics of workplace-level actors.
Wim van Oorschot and Heejung Chung also engage with the issue of flexicurity. In this case, the concern is with ‘dual insecurity’, the subjective perception of the (in)security of both employment and income, assessed from European Social Survey data covering 22 countries. While the national mix of social and labour market policies affects the outcomes, the most important influence on subjective (in)security appears to be the level of per capita GDP. The implication is that in an era of austerity, cutbacks in policy efforts such as lifelong learning and active labour market measures – which are designed to enhance security – will inevitably increase insecurity.
Christian Lhyne Ibsen is concerned to explain the dynamics of coordinated wage bargaining, focusing on Sweden and Denmark as critical cases. He uses experience in the two countries to test three different theories: rational choice, rationalist institutionalism and discursive institutionalism, each implying a different interaction of cooperation and coercion. An adequate explanation of the two cases, he argues, must take account of the non-cooperative character of bargaining coordination and the ways in which cooperation is itself conditioned by power relations.
The complex negotiation of potentially conflicting interests is also central to the article by Robert H. Kleinknecht. His concern is how employee participation through works councils and board-level representation affects companies’ financial performance, particularly in times of economic adversity. Using data from 726 firms listed in national stock exchanges in the majority of European countries, he concludes that strong employee representation is associated with lower financial performance in favourable economic conditions, but that the reverse is the case in periods of economic difficulty. The suggested explanation is that the ‘conservatism’ of employee representatives, by inhibiting high-risk policies, increases company resilience in the face of economic crisis.
The link between employee representation and economic performance is also a key theme of the article by Guy Vernon. More specifically, his concern is the relationship between national trade union structure, pay (in)equality and productivity growth. Using OECD data for 14 countries over 30 years, he finds a contrasting relationship between pay compression and economic performance according to the degree to which trade unions are ‘encompassing’ or more fragmented, and he suggests explanations for this pattern.
The year 2015 will see the first national election in Europe in which EU–imposed austerity is the central issue. The outcome will have important repercussions for all of us. By the time this issue is published, we will all know the likely trajectory of the European political economy in the coming years.