Abstract
This new number of the ‘open’ issue of Transfer contains five articles alongside a sixth, launching a new section of this fourth annual issue of Transfer, entitled ‘EU Policy Debate’. The five articles cover the developments in the industrial relations systems of several European countries, with common features in terms of their analysis. Two of the articles focus more closely on the question of collective bargaining and its various forms from a comparative viewpoint which, very aptly, comprises, on the one hand, wage bargaining in the countries of northern Europe, and, on the other, the development of the mechanism for extending collective agreements in three countries of the south, including France, which, it may be agreed, encompasses both types of welfare state. Two other articles analyse, in two different countries (Serbia and Portugal), how trade unions manage disputes and try to find resources to advance the interests of employees. It may be inferred from these four articles that, although there are common trends, the modes of action of the parties involved, particularly the trade unions, are influenced by their national history. The last article echoes the article on how Portuguese unions grasped the issue of Ryanair’s precarisation policy, in discussing how the practices leading to precarious employment relationships in Germany, beyond platform-based workers and the world of digital technology with its entourage of (bogus) self-employed workers, also affect workers with the contractual status of employees. The opening article in the section devoted to EU policy debate argues in favour of pooling efforts to tackle unemployment in Europe and to adapt the organisation of working time to the challenges raised by the inevitable transitions that occur during the course of the lives of European citizens, irrespective of their employment status.
The first article, by Paul Marginson (Warwick University, United Kingdom) and Jon Erik Dølvik (Fafo, Norway), discusses developments in collective wage bargaining in five countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany and the United Kingdom) and four sectors (construction, manufacturing, industrial cleaning and temporary agency work) against the background of EU enlargement in 2004 and the financial crisis of 2008. The authors seek to establish whether the trend towards decentralisation of collective bargaining that is typical of developments in southern Europe has been the same in the countries of northern Europe, or whether these countries have managed to maintain control over the decentralisation of wage bargaining mechanisms. The authors hope to contribute to the debates on convergence and divergence of the development paths of industrial relations systems in contexts that have accentuated liberalising trends. Is there, as Baccaro and Howell (2017) contend, a liberalising trajectory that transcends institutional differences, or, as postulated by Thelen (2014), do the institutional frameworks proper to each country play a role of resistance, maintaining differences, not least by bringing into play mechanisms that promote solidarity and combat wage inequality? The authors analyse this divergence/convergence question by examining three dimensions: coordination of collective wage bargaining across sectors; articulation between different levels of bargaining; and the regulation of wage floors. They shed light on the differences between a sector exposed to international competition (manufacturing, which, in four countries, explicitly or implicitly plays a leadership role in wage determination) and sectors where activities are confined to the national territory but which, in the cases analysed, were nevertheless all affected by the inflow of workers from Eastern European countries after EU enlargement. Despite a movement towards decentralisation in wage bargaining common to the four countries, manufacturing has nevertheless succeeded in sustaining national coordination in wage determination, enabling it to hold on to a leadership role in this area. From this standpoint, it may be said that there is convergence, but not really towards deregulation. For the other three sectors, the inflow of migrants from Eastern Europe and the increase in posted working (particularly in construction) have destabilised the coordination systems for wage setting (especially in construction, as coordination in the other two sectors was weak) in the four countries other than the UK (where they do not exist). From this point of departure, we can speak of convergence in each of these countries. The response of employers and trade unions to this, in at least two of the countries (Sweden and Germany) has been to reinforce ‘internal protections’ by activating extension mechanisms backed up by legislative decisions (such as the minimum wage in Germany). All in all, in the view of Marginson and Dølvik, it cannot be said that there is a common tendency towards liberalisation. Their analysis describes different responses to an identical impetus in the same sector from one country to another and different consequences in terms of the governance of wage setting, namely different processes. A major outcome lies in the fact that the least structured sectors in terms of industrial relations, which are therefore more vulnerable to external pressures, are those in which joint employer/trade union actions have been taken to improve the structuring of wage setting, in particular by activating the extension mechanism.
This last observation echoes the content of the article by Miguel Ángel García Calavia (University of Valencia) and Michael Rigby (London South Bank University) about the trend in extension provisions for collective agreements in France, Portugal and Spain in a context of increased flexibility and deregulation. The authors start by explaining the various extension regimes: semi-automatic, as in France and Spain (where it is actually more fully automatic in nature), or requiring a coalition of stakeholders, including the government, as in Portugal, to activate or suspend it, or – last scenario – more restrictive, as in other countries. They then analyse developments in the extension mechanism in each of these three countries. Although in these three countries the coverage rate of collective agreements is still high (94 per cent for France, 74 per cent for Portugal, 78 per cent for Spain), movements towards decentralising the bargaining process are reducing the scope of sectoral agreements in terms of content, and many settlements may be scaled down by the use of company agreements. This is particularly applicable to France, where developments were affected by the introduction of representativeness criteria in the early years of this century, followed by the introduction in 2017 of public interest criteria, in other words factoring in the social and economic effects of agreements subject to extension, such as gender equality. In the course of the past two decades in Portugal, the extension mechanism has proved to be very dependent on the political complexion of the government and highly sensitive to the economic situation, with the Troika imposing its suspension in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. As in France, the question of public interest has become one of the criteria that may or may not trigger the extension of collective agreements. In Spain, the principle of automatic extension enshrined in the Workers’ Statute in 1980 has hardly changed since then. In the view of the authors, the retention of the extension mechanism in its current form in Spain is attributable, among other things, to the fact that the trade unions formed a united front to oppose attempted reforms, whereas in the other two countries trade union disunity left the field open to policies that decentralised bargaining, which helped to undermine extension mechanisms.
This dimension of idiosyncrasy in the way in which regulations have been developed or how stakeholders influencing their modes of action have come into being is also to be found in the paper by Francesco Bagnardi and Valentina Petrović, both of the European University Institute in Florence. The two authors, starting from the analysis of a dispute in a Fiat-Chrysler factory in Serbia in 2017, analyse how trade unions mediate between democratic and bureaucratic logics of action. It is a question of establishing how trade unions succeed in supporting workers’ demands, regardless of unfavourable structural constraints and legacies, and, in the case in point, why, in the post-socialist context of Serbia, trade unions are unable to translate workers’ mobilisation into success, to their advantage. What the authors demonstrate is that, in this post-socialist context, trade unions fail to mediate effectively between workers’ demands and the demands of institutional partners. Whereas the literature identifies two models of trade unionism after the fall of communism – on the one hand, distributive, in other words a service unionism that takes its legitimacy from an alliance with the government and employers; on the other hand, representative, depending on workers’ contributions – the authors consider that a mixture of both is more common. The dispute broke out at the Kragujevac plant because one-third of the employees had been laid off (contrary to the management’s commitment on safeguarding jobs), resulting in an increased workload for the remaining staff. Demands were about wages, reorganisation of work as a result of increased work intensity and payment of a promised bonus, as well as transport for the night shift. Three weeks of strikes were held with the support of the two trade unions, one, the successor of the communist regime, having the majority of members, and the other, very much in the minority, but which gained its legitimacy from employee participation. The latter was gradually eased out of the process during the tripartite negotiations characterised by heavy government involvement. All in all, the article shows that, if traditionally non-conflictual unions, successors of the communist past, are called upon to support workers’ demands (democratic legitimacy), they can be caught up in the bureaucratic logic during negotiations in which the government has brought its full weight to bear. The fact that the agreement, far from meeting the workers’ demands, bans strike action for three years shows that non-democratic logic prevailed in this case.
Contrary to the preceding article, the paper by Pedro Mendonça (Napier Edinburgh University), which analyses how a trade union succeeded in defending the interests of precarious workers, shows that unions are capable of devising a strategy to equip themselves with power resources by building networks that are key to strengthening the institutional power of employees. In this article, the author analyses the actions taken by the national union of civil aviation cabin crew staff (Sindicato Nacional do Pessoal de Voo da Aviação Civil – SNPVAC) against the precarisation of Ryanair cabin crew. It seeks to determine the key factors of trade union success in promoting solidarity, organising action and defending the interests of flight attendants. It unscrambles the methods this low-cost airline uses to cut its costs: flight attendants are recruited through agencies based in Ireland, thus circumventing Portuguese social legislation, opening the way to employment on fixed-term or zero-hours contracts. Moreover, Ryanair uses every possible means to thwart trade union action: during the three-day (non-consecutive) strike in Portugal in 2018, the airline replaced strikers with workers brought in from other European countries. In response to this, the SNPVAC waged a national and supranational campaign, earning it support from political parties and social movements involved in combating job insecurity. The union also militated in favour of clearer regulation at international level, lobbying the European Commission to compel Ryanair to apply European legislation. In so doing, the SNPVAC succeeded in recruiting 90 per cent of Ryanair’s flight attendants and generated international cooperation among the countries in which the airline operates and where trade unions all called strikes in July and September 2018. Through these actions, the SNPVAC came to be recognised as a trade union representing the interests of Ryanair employees in Portugal, and it ensured that Portuguese legislation applied to Portuguese employees.
This trade union action, centred on the precarious situation of employees of a company like Ryanair, mirrors the article by Karen Jaehrling and Thorsten Kalina, both from the University of Duisburg-Essen, which seeks to emphasise that the precarisation of working and pay conditions affects not only platform-based workers and self-employed people but also employees who are contractually bound to a company, as seen in the previous article. In seeking to reduce labour costs, employers try to avoid paying for time regarded as unproductive, thus giving rise to ‘grey zones’ of employment. After an overview of developments in this kind of on-call work in Europe, the two authors spell out the distinction that should be drawn between formal on-call work (which is fairly well regulated in Germany, despite leaving some room for manoeuvre for circumventing the regulations) and informal on-call work, while also detailing the various different modes of working covered by these employment relationships. The authors then analyse the developments in on-call work in Germany and show that, although this form of employment is well regulated in Germany, where zero-hours contracts are banned, there are variants: informal (working hours are not defined) and formal (defined working hours but with a percentage of hours not pre-defined that may be called upon as required), and these are far from negligible (2.9 million workers for the informal variant; 1.7 million for the formal variant). For these two variants, the authors stress how they coincide with a low volume of working hours (fewer than 20 hours) and their impact in terms of low pay, together with a high risk of poverty. The informal variant for on-call workers may, in the view of the authors, be regarded as similar to zero-hours contracts, such as Irish ‘if-and-when’ contracts. In the absence of a contractualised employment relationship, this creates a ‘grey zone’ between formal on-call work and self-employment. In the context of the work already carried out on the grey zones of employment (Transfer, 3/2018), the authors suggest that research on these hybrid forms should be taken further among populations who are in a waged employment relationship, and that ‘the existence of resources and space for manoeuvre which […] individuals may have to experiment with, to bring about new regulations’, should be identified in order to take better account of employees’ preferences.
The background to the article launching the section on EU policy debate is the controversy regarding the establishment of a European unemployment insurance scheme, which stalled largely because of the diversity of social protection systems, and hence unemployment benefit systems, from one EU Member State to another, but also because of the difficulty of allowing for moral hazard. Günther Schmid (Free University of Berlin and WZB) considers that a modern concept of the labour market should cover not only the risk of losing money associated with losing a job, but also the risk arising from the inevitable transitions over the life course. Work should pay, but transitions between the different kinds of status (employment, unemployment, training, care obligations etc.) of an individual over the course of a lifetime should also ‘pay’, in the sense that social protection should not only enable people to adapt to the market, but the market should also adapt itself to the changing needs of workers over their life course. What Schmid is arguing for is the idea of a ‘work-life’ insurance, which places the emphasis on moral assurance, enhancing individual autonomy, rather than on moral hazard. He argues that unemployment benefits have a productive function: the positive counterpart to the risk of moral hazard that is moral assurance lies in the encouragement of good behaviour, in keeping with the collective interest, in other words the aspiration for greater social justice and common goals. A conception of this kind, which is based on generous, sufficiently long-term (six to nine months) unemployment benefits, available irrespective of employment status (in other words, also including self-employed workers and people with non-standard employment relationships), calls for the establishment of new rights and obligations, which should be extended as a principle throughout all the EU Member States in order to avoid risks of social dumping. Subject to the implementation of this harmonisation process, to be achieved through the introduction of minimum standards in the different national unemployment benefit systems, Schmid proposes a European mechanism building on the European Social Fund (ESF) rather than the creation of a European unemployment insurance scheme. Turning the ESF into a European Employment and Social Fund combining the elements of social insurance designed, as with the SURE scheme adopted during the COVID-19 crisis, to support weak national systems with loans, would, in the author’s view, show European citizens what the EU can really do to reduce inequalities, combat poverty and help countries to tackle rising unemployment.
These six articles pave the way for a more optimistic view both of the building of a more socially oriented EU and of the possibilities for trade unions to promote more inclusive policies aiming to improve people’s living and working conditions.