European Journal of Industrial Relations

This article contributes to the growing debate on minimum wage coordination at European Union (EU) level. We consider the introduction of a hypothetical EU-wide minimum set at 60 percent of the median wage in each European country; we compare the diverse minimum wage-setting systems across Europe and discuss how they could be affected by such policy. The institutional impact of this European common threshold would be larger in those countries where minimum wages are currently collectively agreed by social partners than in those countries where they are set by statutory regulation. But according to our statistical analysis, such EU-wide minimum wage would affect a larger proportion of the workforce in those countries with statutory minimum wages, since they tend to have a larger low-paid segment of employment.

This article examines the first European Works Council (EWC) to be established in the Italian banking sector, at UniCredit. It focuses on the interaction between Italian, German and Austrian delegations of employee representatives and on the perspectives and practices that reflect their different cultural and institutional backgrounds in industrial relations. Much of the literature suggests that employee representatives from the home country of a multinational company are likely to mould EWC structures in accordance with their own national backgrounds and have greater confidence in dealing with central management in EWC meetings. Our findings partly substantiate this argument, but also suggest that minority delegations, when they have the benefit of strong national institutional arrangements and less fragmented union patterns, are more likely to be cohesive and experienced and therefore are able to challenge management and sometimes win significant arguments over strategy.

This article examines trade union responses to the economic crisis in Ireland. The ‘Irish story’ is primarily one of union accommodation and cooperation. Conflict was present, but was sporadic and generally sectional in nature, and did not reach the scale of mass mobilization witnessed in the other European countries that received financial aid from the Troika. Why was Ireland different? This is explained by the nature of the contextual challenge, unions’ ideological inheritance, their organizational capacity and the opportunity structures available.

This article explores the involvement of organized social actors (trade unions and business groups) in the reform of public pension systems in Greece and Turkey. Most early studies of the reform of welfare policies perceived benefits in a consensual policy process, but more recent neoliberal literature has been critical of the political involvement of trade unions. On the basis of interviews with actors involved in the reform process in Greece and Turkey, I conclude that the effectiveness of social pacts is contingent on the financial, political and organizational resources available to the actors involved.

Industrial relations scholars have argued that east-west labour migration may benefit trade unions in Central and Eastern Europe. By focusing on the distributional aspect of wage policies adopted by two competing Romanian trade unions in the healthcare sector, this article challenges the assumption of a virtuous link between migration, labour shortages and collective wage increases. We show that migration may also displace collective and egalitarian wage policies in favour of individual and marketized ones that put workers in competition with one another. Thus, the question is not so much whether migration leads to wage increases in sending countries, but whether trade unions’ wage demands in response to outward migration consolidate collective solidarity and coordination in wage policy-making or support its individualization and commodification.