This article provides an overview of academic and public policy debates on the role and effects of collective bargaining. The motivation behind this article is that the academic and political debate ...is – and ever was – characterized by many controversies. It is explained that these controversies often arise because of different disciplinary, theoretical and empirical approaches. It will also be outlined how the empirical and theoretical debates influenced the Zeitgeist in public policy making. Hence, the article provides an overview of the knowledge on the role and effects of collective bargaining as well as how this knowledge influenced and guided (or not) politically initiated institution building and reforms of collective bargaining systems.
I analyse the incidence of trust between employee representatives and management at the firm level in EU member states. Most previous analyses focus primarily on employees’ trust in the employer, but ...I consider both sides. The analysis confirms, but generalizes, some known stylized facts such as that trust is relatively high in Scandinavian countries but relatively low in Mediterranean countries. My analysis also reveals a number of novel stylized facts, including a high degree of variability in Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, strong mutual trust is very rare throughout Europe and the trust relationship is systematically asymmetric, as employers’ trust in the employee side is systematically higher than the reverse relationship.
In this article it is argued that the economic crisis has made national collective bargaining systems increasingly multi-layered, perforated and dynamically unstable, i.e. hybrid. The authors explain ...these transformations in terms of the concomitance of two different sources of change which do not necessarily follow the same logics. The first source stems from national systems’ endogenous logic of path dependency and the second from pressure to reform in accordance with exogenously applied strategies and logics. It is argued that these sources act like a whipsaw, pushing and pulling national collective bargaining systems between the two logics, leading to hybrid collective bargaining systems.
Whether collective wage bargaining impedes the implementation of variable pay systems is uncertain. The authors argue that much of this uncertainty is attributable to the fact that research neglects ...differences in the institutional structure of bargaining. Using representative company-level data for all member states of the European Union, the authors investigate the incidence of variable pay systems in general as well as pay types that include payment-by-results, performance-related pay, and team-related pay under various bargaining arrangements. Findings show that the institutional structure of collective bargaining matters: Variable pay systems thrive under company and multilevel collective bargaining, whereas their implementation is limited under national-level collective wage bargaining.
This article presents a critique of the ‘methodological nationalism’ of traditional comparative industrial relations. It investigates nine different sectors across the 27 EU member states on the ...basis of seven empirical indicators. It is found that industrial relations vary across sectors as deeply as they do across countries, and that a cluster analysis of sectoral industrial relations produces very different results from one at national aggregate level. The concept of ‘national model’ of industrial relations, implying coherence and homogeneity within countries, and geographical typologies of industrial relations ‘types’, are therefore put in question. The article concludes by pointing at the theoretical and methodological implications of a focus on the sector as an important level of analysis.
The COVID‐19 outbreak has led to an increase in social dialogue in general and, in particular, to an increase in tripartite cooperation between social partners' organizations and state authorities. ...This paper takes a critical look behind this cooperation and investigates the underlying rationales behind the tripartite cooperation in 19 countries. It is shown that even though the cooperation generally fulfilled its problem‐solving function, an expressive function that signaled unity was identified to be of equal importance in such a time of crisis. This expressive function is also identified to potentially serve as the basis for a renewed social partnership.
Trust between actors in firms per se as well as in the employment relationship, i.e. between the representatives of employees and the management, is usually seen in the literature to affect firm ...performance positively, yet to date there has been no systematic analysis of the effect of different forms of trust, including mutual trust, on firms' financial performance. In this article we argue that only mutual trust, rather than all forms of trust, is sufficient to systematically constitute an advantage for firms and ultimately materialize in firms' profitability increases. We test our hypotheses on the basis of a representative and matched employee/employer side data set of firms in the member states of the European Union. Our analysis confirms our hypothesis that only strong mutual trust is able to systematically impact increases in firm profitability positively and weaker forms of trust and unilateral trust do not suffice.
PurposeThis paper addresses the puzzle of why the same workplace employment relations regimes can lead to different performances and why different regimes can produce the same performance. It is ...argued that the incidence of mutual, and not necessarily unilateral, trust between the employee representation and the management accounts for these differences, as mutual trust fosters information sharing and helps to strike deals that are mutually beneficial. Against the background that the institutional and organizational characteristics of some workplace employment relations regimes also constitutes information sharing and joint decision making, the author further argues that mutual trust is a functional equivalent.Design/methodology/approachMethodologically, the article is international and cross-country comparative in nature and conducted on the basis of a unique, large and transnational comparable data set of the employment relationship at firm level in eleven countries.FindingsOur results show that strong mutual trust is associated with significantly higher incidences of increases in firm profitability, regardless of the workplace employment relations regime in which the firms are embedded.Practical implicationsThe results clearly indicate that trust between the employee representation and the management works as a functional equivalent to performance enhancing employment relations regimes. Therefore, some policy recommendations and imposed institutional reforms of employment relations regimes by the IMF and the European Central Bank in some countries are sub-optimal and might not have been necessary. Trust building initiatives between the employee representation and the management are therefore an alternative, which is less conflictual and could have the same effect on the performance of firms.Originality/valuePrevious analyses on differences in the performance effects of workplace employment relations regime concentrated almost exclusively on institutional factors. Factors that account for differences in the functioning of regimes such as in particular the role of trust were not considered before. Against this background, the originality of this analysis is that it clearly shows that it is not sufficient to consider only the institutional and organizational structure of regimes, but it is essential for a better understanding of the effects of the employment relationship to consider factors which account for the functioning of the regimes such as, in particular, trust.
Using representative company‐level data for all Member States of the European Union, the authors analyse the relationship between different processes and institutional structures of collective ...bargaining and the development of company labour productivity. Their results clearly show that these differences have wide‐ranging effects. While some processes and structures of collective bargaining – specifically sectorally uncoordinated systems – appear to be detrimental to company performance, the opposite can be said about sectorally coordinated systems. Thus, what matters are the processes and institutional structures in which collective bargaining is embedded and not whether bargaining should be conducted collectively or individually.
Employers’ organizations (EOs) are the voice of business interests in social partnership and socio‐economic policy making. Their legitimacy depends on the willingness of employers to join them as ...members. We examine the role of two types of power that EOs confer onto their members as drivers of EO membership: countervailing power against labour and organizational power. By analysing large‐scale micro‐level data on more than 30,000 business establishments across 27 EU countries in 2013 and 2019, we find that at the micro‐level, company size, workplace unionization and the presence of trade unions and works councils are positively associated with membership, as is union density at the macro‐level. These findings suggest that, in contrast to contemporary arguments in the EO literature, countering the collective power of labour remains an important motivation for EO membership. The positive impact of company size also suggests that organizational power, that is the ability to influence public policies and collective agreements through EOs, dominates the services provided by EOs to their members as a selective incentive for EO membership. Further tests of this argument, however, yield inconclusive results.
PDF
