Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research

This article deals with recent developments of atypical employment in Germany, its present extent and current patterns. In its introductory remarks it differentiates between standard employment and atypical forms. It then describes the development and structures, enabling an analysis of the long-term consequences. It goes on to introduce a crucial distinction between atypical and precarious employment on the basis of explicitly defined criteria. The article ends by presenting certain explanations to a large extent missing in existing research.

Depending on the country in question, the crisis has had different impacts on employment. We will analyse the main reasons for these differences and scrutinize the main characteristics of the policies that have been implemented in reaction to the crisis. The analysis focuses mainly on a comparison between France and Germany. This leads us to stress the differences between these two countries in the ability of social partners to find ways to prevent redundancies through job protection agreements. It appears that the gap between job protection and employment protection can be overcome when certain conditions are met in dealing with employees working short time, with training as a paramount consideration. We highlight the role of new working time arrangements and regulations – among them working time accounts – for promoting flexibility and security for both employers and employees.

This article discusses local trade union power in labour adjustment processes within the Nordic systems of industrial relations by comparing labour adjustment processes in construction and manufacturing in Finland and Norway. The quality of cooperative relations and the conditions for exchange – through co-decision mechanisms and procedures, as well as rules for temporary lay-offs and dismissal selections – are essential for union influence. Together with production technologies, the organization of work and employee competence, such institutions and regulations interact in influencing union power, providing more influence to the unions in the Norwegian cases than the Finnish ones, while the unions in the manufacturing cases were more influential than those in construction.

Legislation on minimum wages exists in most EU Member States, but European trade unions have very different views on it. Nordic unions are especially negative, whereas many other union organizations are strongly positive. The present article examines these differences, explores how they can be understood and discusses their possible consequences for transnational union cooperation on issues related to statutory minimum wages. It is primarily based on survey and interview data.

The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) is a general (multi trade) union in the UK, predominately organizing in the retail and distribution sectors. Since 2006 Usdaw has increased its membership by 84 000 members – an increase of 26 per cent, making it in this respect the most successful TUC-affiliated union in the UK. This growth coincided with Usdaw’s decision to develop itself as an organizing union, which involved the establishment of an Usdaw Organising Academy, a paradigm shift in its approach to organizing, and the creative development of new systems and practices to manage the union. This article describes this process of change and so goes some way to providing an explanation for Usdaw’s success. The article also situates Usdaw’s approach within the broader academic and policy debates about implementing the Organizing Model, and draws out some general lessons from Usdaw’s experience.

This article analyses the operation of European works councils (EWCs) in three multinational companies (GSK, Coca-Cola and UniCredit) across six EU Member States (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Italy and the UK). Based on interviews with EWC members and other employee representatives in these companies, it argues that EWCs are in a process of continual development, and examines the influences on their effectiveness by using a fivefold typology: company type, path dependency, socio-institutional environments, actors’ strategies and internal EWC dynamics. The article reveals that our respondents refer most frequently to the internal dynamics of EWCs as the key influence on their effectiveness, and concludes by assessing the policy implications for trade unions.

The formal texts of agreements establishing European works councils (EWCs) set out the ‘starting conditions’ that regulate the activity of these transnational institutions. This article complements an analysis of the formal texts of agreements in 111 EWCs in the metallurgical, chemical and financial sectors with an assessment of the experience of Portuguese members of these EWCs. An analysis of topics in the 111 EWC agreements reveals several difficulties with the functioning of EWCs. Beyond the texts of EWC agreements, the diversity of workers’ representatives’ experiences is crucial to a better understanding of how EWCs function. The final section of the article highlights several good practices experienced by (Portuguese) workers’ representatives belonging to three EWC select committees in three multinationals: VW Group (metallurgical sector), Air Liquide Group (chemical sector) and Banco Espírito Santo Group (financial sector).

Due to the late start of industrialization and development of a working class and democratization in Turkey, all the labour and democratic rights gained through class struggle elsewhere in Europe were introduced in Turkey by the state. This saw the detailed framework of Turkish industrial relations being defined by law, with trade unions not challenging the limits to enhance their rights. Previous collective labour acts had been criticized for decades as a heritage of the 1980 military coup. Following amendments to the 1982 Constitution in 2010, a new collective labour act, the Trade Union and Collective Agreement Act (TUCAA), was adopted in 2012. In this article, the Trade Union and Collective Agreement Act will be examined from the perspective of the triad of the right to organize, the right to bargain collectively, and the right to strike, with the main changes also being reviewed in a general comparison with the previous acts.

The European sectoral social dialogue is rapidly becoming a pillar of European governance. It enables professional relationships to form in Member States, respecting each country’s autonomous rights, in line with the subsidiarity principle. European sectoral social dialogue is created through the initiative of the European social partners, that is, representative groups of employers and employees in the relevant sector. The dialogue materializes through the formation of a sectoral social dialogue committee as an official discussion and negotiation forum. Creating a sectoral social dialogue committee in the sports sector is a difficult process because of the specific characteristics of sport, the involvement of young people, the lack of social dialogue at national level in sport, as well as problems with the representativeness of employers’ and employees’ organizations and sectoral segmentation.