Abstract
The 11th European Regional Congress of the International Labour and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) was held in Milan in September 2016. For the second time, the European Journal of Industrial Relations (EJIR) offered a prize for the best comparative paper on European industrial relations by a young scholar. The winner was Valentina Paolucci, whose article opens this issue. She examines the role of collective bargaining in addressing flexibility and security in the chemical and pharmaceutical sector in Italy and Denmark. The analysis demonstrates the subtle interplay of institutional and non-institutional structures in shaping the outcomes in each country.
The runner-up was Anna Mori, whose three-country comparison follows. Her focus is the impact of outsourcing of public services on employment relations and working conditions in Italy, the United Kingdom and Denmark. She finds that although outsourcing blurs the organizational boundaries between public and private sectors everywhere, making terms and conditions of employment fragmented and less protected, distinct structures and legacies of national employment relations institutions result in differences between national trajectories.
Unemployment insurance funds, subsidized by the state and controlled by the labour movement (the ‘Ghent system’), have contributed to high trade union densities in three Nordic countries, Finland, Sweden and Denmark. However, in each case, there have been important recent changes involving less favourable benefit regimes and challenges to the de facto trade union monopoly of their administration. Laust Høgedahl and Kristian Kongshøj investigate these changes and analyse the impact on union membership and the associated union-managed funds. Benefit retrenchment and increased contributions have led to a sharp decline in membership in Sweden, whereas this trend has been less pronounced in Finland and Denmark. In the latter countries, the main trend has been a shift from union-led to alternative forms of fund membership.
Carsten Strøby Jensen also examines union membership in the Nordic countries, in this case asking how far political attitudes influence the likelihood of employees being members of a trade union. Using European Social Survey data, he shows that left-wing political attitudes have the most impact on the likelihood of trade union membership in Sweden and to a lesser extent in Denmark. In Norway and Finland, there is no statistically significant impact.
There has been considerable recent debate on the significance of transnational collective agreements (TCAs) as a new expression of the Europeanization of industrial relations. Michael Whittall, Miguel Martinez Lucio, Stephen Mustchin, Volker Telljohann and Fernando Rocha Sánchez focus on experience in Volkswagen, examining two of the TCAs signed by its European and global works councils. They examine the impact on the ground through studies of subsidiaries in Britain, Italy, Spain and Germany. The agreements have improved local industrial relations and strengthened cross-national interaction between employee representatives, despite significant differences in views concerning how unions should engage with management.
There are long-standing debates on the economic effects of mandatory employee representation structures. John Forth, Alex Bryson and Anitha George use data from the European Company Survey to explore the prevalence, determinants and outcomes of employee representation at workplace level across the European Union (EU). As is well known, there is extensive variation in the coverage of both trade union organization and works councils or similar bodies. Presence of such representation varies greatly according to workplace size and also industrial sector. More generally, national institutional factors are important in encouraging or discouraging the establishment of workplace-based structures for employee representation. Hence, many of the existing ‘stylized facts’ demonstrated in studies of a few countries apply more broadly within Europe as a whole.