European Journal of Industrial Relations

We examine the effects of State-led decentralization of collective bargaining on workplace employment relations. After exploring the development of company-level collective bargaining in France in the broader European context, we analyse intra-national variations in social dialogue practices across companies and workplaces, and propose a classification of four workplace clusters. As the decentralization process varies in its extent and in nature between types of workplace, we argue that the diversity of workplace practices is best explained by contrasting reactions to legal requirements. Nevertheless, these requirements have standardizing effects on certain bargaining practices, which might in turn lead to the impoverishment of the collective bargaining process.

Dispute resolution by third parties is a cornerstone of national industrial relations systems across Europe. However, the formal powers of the institutions of conciliation, mediation and arbitration vary considerably across countries. I aim to explain the existence of strong third-party intervention across 17 Western European countries, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. I test two hypotheses: first, that strong institutions are established to control collective bargaining when unions are powerful but fragmented; second, that strong institutions reflect legal traditions that use civil courts rather than specialized labour courts. The analysis supports the first hypothesis but not the second. Recent reforms since the Great Recession in Southern European countries further corroborate this finding.

Trade unions have been charged with neglecting labour market ‘outsiders’, while alternative actors have emerged to represent these. In response, unions have stepped up their claim to be representative of all workers, without distinction. We review the theoretical and policy debates on this issue, and argue that representation as such has been under-theorized. We draw on Saward’s concept of ‘representative claims’ to analyse the different grounds for competing assertions of representativeness. We identify four main forms of claims, and illustrate these with empirical examples. We conclude that these different claims are mutually reinforcing in stimulating attention to the outsiders, and in their interaction with institutional settings, they have a performative effect in defining new social actors.

The idea of ‘active inclusion’ was embraced by the European Commission in 2008 and supported financially through the European Social Fund, inspiring national and subnational reforms throughout Europe. This article analyses the role played by social partners in its implementation, using three comparative case studies to assess its transposition at the local level in Spain, France and Sweden. Despite convergence in the vocabulary used by actors involved in labour market governance, translation into local measures is different, with significant implications for policy-making. To explain the varieties of active inclusion, I focus on the interplay between structure and the agency of competing local political and social actors who participate in labour market governance.

Employment opportunities and conditions of vulnerable social groups are affected by multiple agencies (including unions and employers) and labour market institutions. This study, drawing on iterative long-term research within workplaces, aims to discover the key interrelations among factors that are peculiar to different contexts. The research questions are pursued through a comparison of the treatment of women and migrants, respectively, in an Italian and a US car-manufacturing plant. Labour legislation is particularly important in the US case, whereas in the Italian context employers have more discretion. In both environments, unions have only a limited role.

Labour market segmentation is at the forefront of national and European policy debates. While the European Commission and the OECD claim to promote what they see as more inclusive policies, academic observers remain sceptical. The dualization literature in particular points to stable equilibria that sustain divisions between labour market insiders and outsiders. In this article, we trace recent reform trajectories in a diverse group of nine European countries marked by a high share of temporary employment: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Our case studies show that recent reforms of employment regulation involve much more dynamism than one would expect based on the experiences of the two preceding decades, or from dualization or insider–outsider theories. The reform trajectories display rather contradictory approaches, sometimes in close succession.