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Lower-skilled workers face increasing pressures. Their bargaining position is declining under the twin pressures of globalisation and technological change; and they risk losing access to better positions as firms' pay and conditions arrangements increasingly drift apart. Rising between-firm differences partly come about through increasing separation of lower-skilled workers into lower-paying firms with worse conditions, thereby reducing their opportunities further. Such polarisation is partly driven by (domestic) outsourcing where main firms take certain tasks that are seen as non-core out of their payroll, instead purchasing those same tasks from another official employer or temporary employment agency while retaining control. Outsourcing generally brings worse conditions and lower pay. This paper uses cross-national European data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) along with contextual data to study how outsourcing – proxied by moves to business services providers or temporary employment agencies – contributes to a worse labour market position of lower-educated workers over time. I find that (1) domestic outsourcing is increasing over time across Europe; (2) outsourced workers are working under generally worse conditions than their counterparts; and (3) this process is not universal: it hits harder in sectors with greater technological innovation and can be alleviated by union density and worker representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of European social dialogue, little is known about the social policy preferences of EU employers' organizations (EEOs). Building on the literature on industrial relations and the role of business in welfare state development, this article explores the preferences of key EEOs (BusinessEurope, SGI Europe and SMEunited) in vocational education and training (VET), active and passive labour market policies, pensions and work–family reconciliation. Software-based qualitative content analysis of 75 position papers and 19 joint declarations, triangulated with four elite semi-structured interviews, is employed to assess employers' preferences along four national and two European dimensions. Largely in line with the power resources theory, EEOs favour cost containment and social investment, by strengthening labour market flexicurity and reducing skills mismatches through VET. Conflicting logics of membership and influence guide the actions of EEOs: members are wary of legislation impinging on national social policy traditions; yet, greater European assertiveness makes lobbying efforts unavoidable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine job quality effects of new digital technologies, using the European frame of seven job quality domains: Pay, Working Time Quality, Prospects, Skills and Discretion, Work Intensity, Social Environment, and Physical Environment. Theoretical effects are ambivalent across all domains. The analysis of these effects confirms that digital technologies can both improve and harm job quality depending on how they are used. In light of this analysis and to think through the challenge of regulating digital technologies, we review emerging regulations across several European countries. Drawing on the principles of human-centred design, we argue that worker participation is important for securing good job quality outcomes, at both the innovation and adoption stages. We also consider the application of data protection legislation to the regulation of job quality. Overall, the paper extends debate about the future of work beyond employment and pay, on to a consideration of job quality more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue (SI) brings the industrial relations scholarship on the public sector into dialogue with the comparative political economy (CPE) literature on growth models/regimes. While the former has paid great attention to the public sector, in CPE the public sector has been analysed less, and mostly as subaltern to the export-sector's actors, interests and institutions. We posit that the public sector matters for CPE in its own right for three reasons. First, the state remains today the single largest employer in virtually every European economy, providing incomes to a large segment of the middle class. Second, public employers' wage bill – one of the largest items of governments' current expenditures – is funded by the taxpayers. Hence, public sector wage policy is fiscal policy, ultimately pursued by public/political employers. Third, public employers are simultaneously public managers and political sovereigns acting in the shadow of hierarchy. Case-study contributions to the SI detail how these insights matter within different European growth regimes: (1) the Mediterranean demand-led growth regime (France, Italy, Spain and Portugal), (2) the German export-led growth regime, (3) the Nordic balanced growth regime (Denmark and Sweden) and (4) the FDI-led Eastern European growth regime (Czechia and Slovakia). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global expansion of the platform economy raised questions about where and by whom different forms of platform work are performed in Europe. This study focuses on microworking – that is, where an anonymous 'crowd' completes piecemeal digital work. Specifically, we address two questions about microworking in the EU-27: Where is microworking performed? Who is performing it? Based on the geolocation of 5,239 workers active on six prominent microworking platforms, we identify variation in the relative prevalence of microworking across the EU. Furthermore, we build on existing research to provide a more granular understanding of different classes of microworkers, in terms of diversity and (income) dependency. Four distinct classes of microworkers emerge through statistical modelling of eight relevant diversity and dependency indicators: age, gender, education, citizenship, experience, hours per week, personal income earned, household income. We label these classes Explorers, Enthusiasts, Supplementers, and Dependents. The identification of these emergent classes and varied prevalence of microworking across the EU, suggest the importance of heterogeneity to both the future study and regulation of microwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widespread rhetoric suggests that market-like rules dominate employment relationships, and particularly compensation, but empirical evidence is inconclusive. This research examines organisations' compensation policies in clusters of European capitalist economies to test such a hypothesis. Four fuzzy clusters emerged from data, namely, Standard, Internalised, Competitive and Incentive, which illustrates a division between organisation- and market-based models. Collective pay rules characterise organisation-based model, and this is the predominant model in all countries except for the liberal market economies. Firms from different models of capitalism rely on internal labour market pay rules, suggesting that the scope of the liberal market system is narrow. Differences within clusters of capitalist economies suggest a role for agency and hidden labour market specificities in each grouping. The similarities of pay policies open room to identifying capitalist economies differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes and reviews research on union responses to precarious work in Europe, based on a systematic coding of 56 case study-based articles published between 2008 and 2019. Analyses of these cases suggest two paths to labour market dualism, with the first involving institutional fragmentation and union division, and the second a combination of weak structural power and partnership-oriented union identities. The authors also identify two paths to solidarity, with the result of reduced precarity for peripheral workers: a conflict-based path and a social partnership-based path. Campaigns to organize migrant workers present distinctive institutional and structural challenges to unions, with studies involving migrants most often finding 'failed solidarity', in which inclusive organizing fails to reduce precarity. The article integrates these findings with past frameworks on union responses to precarious work and concludes with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flexicurity approach to labour market policy may offer advantages for trade unions but also poses challenges, given their weak situation in policy formulation at EU level and in many member states. This article explores unions’ capacity to mobilize around flexicurity issues and to influence policy debates and outcomes in two member states. In the UK, flexicurity has low political salience and unions have little capacity for mobilization or influence, although they have linked flexicurity to campaigns on agency workers and restructuring. In France, unions have developed alternative proposals on making employment pathways secure and have succeeded in shifting debate towards these proposals rather than the Commission’s flexicurity recommendations, although differences with the positions of employers and the state have limited outcomes to date. EU policies provide only weak leverage, since trade unions’ ability to influence labour market policy depends on their position within domestic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The possibility of convergence of national industrial relations systems has been debated for a long time. However, the predominant approach is to stress the persistence of national variation. This article draws on a number of comparative studies in order to consider whether globalization and European policy developments are important drivers towards increasing convergence. Consequently, the article concludes that a critical review of the prevalent research methods is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the scholarly attention devoted to the European Employment Strategy (EES), its policy content remains elusive. This article first explores the ways in which the 'open method of coordination', which departs from traditional regulatory approaches, tends to 'depoliticize' the issue of employment, fashioning its discourse in an apparently technical language. This constitutes a serious shortcoming. There follows a systematic analysis of Greek experience, which shows that the analytical template of 'Eurosclerosis' used for assessing and combating unemployment is based on false premises. This orthodoxy attributes unemployment to high wages and an expensive welfare state; but Greece is a low-productivity economy with an ineffective welfare state, relying almost exclusively on low wages and social transfers. Failure to come to terms with this reality hampers both the appropriateness of EU recommendations and the Greek government's capacity to deal with unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of an accelerating climate emergency, the introduction frames the strategies and actions adopted by labour and unions to reduce carbon emissions that are presented in the articles contributing to this special issue. Industrial relations scholarship, which has been slow to address the climate emergency, has focussed on the jobs versus environment dilemma, the role of unions, technical innovation versus social unionism, and just transition approaches. While labour and union approaches in different sectors across Europe are largely confined to variants of ecological modernization, a more proactive transformative strategy opening up an alternative eco-socialist vision for the future is emerging. The issue highlights the contradictions in union strategies, the drivers of change and the way forward in pursuance of a green economy through a focus on the roles of government and the public sector, the organization of labour and the labour process, and education and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the role that occupations played in recent trends in wage inequality in some European countries. Using EU-SILC data, we observe that most of the changes in wage inequality between 2005 and 2014 were the result of changes in the distribution of wages within occupations. A longer term approximation using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) shows similar patterns. We conclude that occupational dynamics did not drive recent trends in wage inequality in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relationship between 'flexicurity' systems, unemployment and well-being outcomes for young people in Europe. A key tenet of the flexicurity approach is that greater flexibility of labour supply supports transitions into employment, trading longer-term employment stability for short-term job instability. However, there is a risk that young people experience greater job insecurity, both objective and subjective, with less stable contracts and more frequent unemployment spells. Our research draws on data from the European Social Survey and uses multi-level models to explore whether and how flexibility-security arrangements moderate the effect of past and present unemployment on the well-being of young people. We distinguish between flexibility-security institutions that foster improved job prospects and those that provide financial security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present comparative research on precarious work and trade union strategies in three sectors (construction, industrial cleaning, temporary agency work) across seven European countries. Specific sectors have a profile of precarious work that is remarkably similar across countries, originating from similar employer strategies and work organizations. This results in unions facing comparable challenges concerning precarious work at sectoral level and developing comparable sectoral strategies to combat precarious work. The success of these strategies depends to a large extent on the available power resources. Between sectors within single countries, we observe some similarities but also very substantial differences in their institutional configuration and in actors' constellations, power resources and repertoires of action. National institutional contexts seem much less significant than often assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How far, in what ways and on what issues do trade unions in Europe cooperate cross-nationally? Three important structural factors may explain differences in cooperation: national industrial relations contexts, sectoral contexts and unions' organizational resources. We examine transnational union cooperation at sectoral level, and test the explanatory value of these three factors. We address cooperation in five broad sectors, using a Europe-wide questionnaire-based survey of trade union activities. We find that sectoral differences explain more of the variation in levels of transnational cooperation than do industrial relations regimes when controlling for resources, whereas both sectors and regimes influence which issues are seen as important for current and future cooperation. In addition, small trade unions engage in much less transnational cooperation than large ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic transformation after 1989 and the global economic recession that began in 2008 have caused an increase in precarious work in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. As a result of refamilialization, precarious work acquired a specific form for women. We use the Czech Republic as an example in analysing a trend that is obvious throughout the Visegrád countries and apply the capabilities approach to understand the dynamics of precarious work in the lives of women with care responsibilities. Neither the objective characteristics of work nor its subjective assessment alone makes it possible to understand precarious work. The explanation lies in the (temporal) dynamics of the interconnection between the two: insecure jobs accepted by women with care responsibilities as a temporary strategy may turn into a trap excluding them from a stable job. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, trade union membership in Central and Eastern Europe has been in continuous decline, and unions in the region are generally considered weak. However, little is known about the actual relevance of trade unions for individual workers in the post-socialist world. We explore the role that unions played in protecting their members from the negative effects of the global economic crisis. Using data for 21 post-socialist countries from the Life in Transition-2 survey, we find that union members were less likely than comparable non-members to lose their jobs during the crisis. This beneficial effect of union membership was particularly pronounced in countries which were hardest hit by the crisis. At the same time, union members were more likely to experience wage reductions, suggesting that unions were engaged in concession bargaining. Overall, our results challenge the common view that unions in the post-socialist countries are irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Special Issue on industrial relations in Central and Eastern Europe since the financial and economic crisis. Already dependent economically on funding from the west and lacking the robust industrial relations institutions traditional in much of Western Europe, countries in the region were particularly vulnerable. However, there are important cross-national differences, and the strategies of key actors have significantly affected the outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under external pressure, the Greek system of industrial relations has undergone radical regulatory changes since 2010. These have led to a significant contraction of higher level bargaining and a process of disorganized decentralization, bringing the collective bargaining system to a brink of collapse. Emerging demands on the part of both employers and unions to preserve multi-level bargaining, together with greater support on the part of the state, could halt or even reverse some of these trends. But the scope for success of such efforts depends on how far 'regulated austerity' continues to dominate European policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformations of European labour markets and welfare systems have deepened the problem of precarious work, leading trade unions to develop strategies to represent and organize the workers affected. We focus on Italy and Spain, two of the countries with the most precarious labour markets in Europe, and address the specificity and variety of union responses. We relate these responses to the different institutional contexts, including employment and welfare regulation, and the power resources unions can draw upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2003 the International Industrial Relations Association held its 13th World Congress at the Freie Universität Berlin. The broad theme was "Beyond Traditional Employment," a reflection of far-reaching change in the nature of work and the status of workers, and the consequential pressures on the institutions and processes of industrial relations. The first two articles focus on employment policy in Europe. Two articles consider issues related to the eastern enlargement of the European Union. Following their accession, employees in the new Member States are covered by the provisions of the directive on European Works Councils (EWC), and some companies anticipated this requirement by enlarging their EWCs in advance.

This article examines the undeclared economy in general, and envelope wages more particularly, in 10 Central and East European countries, drawing on a 2013 Eurobarometer survey. The explanatory approach focuses on the asymmetry between the codified laws and regulations of the formal institutions and the unwritten socially shared rules of informal institutions. A strong association is revealed between the prevalence of envelope wage payments and the degree of asymmetry between formal and informal institutions at both the individual and country levels. We explore the implications for theorising and for tackling undeclared work practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of working-time flexibility and autonomy on time adequacy, using the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey. It addresses gender differences and institutional contexts in the UK, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, and reveals that time arrangements have gendered meanings. While working-time flexibility and autonomy are positively related to time adequacy for women, for men they tend to imply overtime and work intensification. Furthermore, working-time regimes also shape time arrangements. In the UK, employees have time adequacy primarily when they work fixed hours, while in the Netherlands, employees profit most from working-time autonomy. Moreover, unlike in Germany and the UK, men and women in the Netherlands and Sweden benefit more equally from working-time flexibility and autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses data for 23 countries elicited from the 2010/11 wave of the European Social Survey to examine the stability of social capital as a predictor of job satisfaction at a time of economic crisis. The analysis reveals a remarkably resilient impact of social capital and its constituent components during the economic downturn. However, this resilience is much less pronounced when the focus is on countries where the crisis was most severe, suggesting an economic development threshold below which certain social capital components lose their associational impact. However, religious activity is significantly associated with workers’ job satisfaction in these economies, providing comfort during times of socio-economic difficulty. The extent of organizational trust, measured by proxy variables for participative decision-making, has by far the strongest association with job satisfaction. This suggests that employers need to think again about the way they treat their employees to maximize the benefits of social capital and, ultimately, improve the job satisfaction scores of their workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout most of Europe, trade union membership is in decline, despite a vast range of initiatives intended to reverse this decline. This article explores why members retain their union membership, through surveys conducted in 14 union organizations in 12 countries. It highlights the importance of workplace representation for the provision of support to members. The article also assesses how the reasons that underpin membership retention might be incorporated into union organizing and renewal strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The viability of coordinated, multi-employer bargaining arrangements as a cornerstone of labour market regulation in Western Europe has come under further threat following the crisis. Already, pressure for decentralization had corroded the capacity of sector agreements to specify universal standards applicable at company level. Procedural mechanisms articulating the two levels had become looser and more open-ended. This process has intensified in Northern European countries, whilst in Southern Europe, under pressure from the European institutions, a frontal assault on multi-employer bargaining arrangements is now underway. Reinforced European economic governance intensifies the need for coordination of bargaining across borders, but the capacity for achieving this is significantly reduced by the erosion of capacities for effective coordination within national bargaining systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how the diversity of minimum wage systems affects earnings inequalities within European countries. It relies on the combination of harmonized microdata from household surveys, data on national statutory minimum wages and coverage rates and information on minimum rates compiled from more than 1100 sectoral-level agreements across Europe. The analysis covers 18 countries over the period 2007–2009. Empirical results confirm the intuition of many practitioners that the combination of sectoral minima and high collective bargaining coverage can be regarded as a functional equivalent of a binding statutory minimum wage, at least for earnings inequalities. Regression results suggest indeed that both a national statutory minimum and, in countries with sectoral minima, higher collective bargaining coverage is significantly associated with lower levels of (overall and inter-industry) wage inequalities and a smaller fraction of workers paid below prevailing minima. Several robustness checks confirm these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses European Social Survey data for 22 countries. We assess the relationship between feelings of employment and income insecurity (dual-insecurity) among workers and national flexicurity policies in the areas of lifelong learning, active labour market policy, modern social security systems and flexible and reliable contractual arrangements. We find that dual-insecurity feelings are lower in countries that score better on most flexicurity polices, but these effects are in all cases outweighed by levels of GDP per capita. Thus feelings of insecurity are reduced more by the affluence of a country than by its social policies. However, affluence is strongly correlated with the policy efforts designed to reduce insecurity, especially active labour market policies and lifelong learning, two policy areas that are threatened with cuts as a result of austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of flexicurity have focused on formal institutions within distinctive national labour market systems. However, the level and types of flexibility and security in a national labour market are to an important extent influenced by company-level processes, relationships and policies; thus a micro-perspective should be integrated into the study of flexibility and security. This article advances understanding of the influences of decentralized rule-making and its links with the macro level by drawing on case study research in four multinational companies, each with subsidiaries in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the UK. It reveals major differences in terms of flexibility and security between companies operating in the same country, and major similarities between the subsidiaries of the same multinational. Product market characteristics affect local autonomy to define human resource policies; national institutions and local circumstances then affect the capabilities of trade unions and works councils to negotiate local flexibility-security trade-offs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three theoretical approaches to the study of coordinated collective bargaining, each positing different causal mechanisms: rational choice, rationalist institutionalism and discursive institutionalism. Each approach involves a different view of the exercise of power and distributional consequences. The three approaches are applied to the critical cases of Sweden and Denmark. The conclusion drawn is that coordination is not purely cooperative, and that cooperation is itself conditioned by power relations. Thus power must be placed at the heart of coordination studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do works councils and employee board-level representation affect company performance? Research on employee participation provides mixed and sometimes contradictory findings. This article argues that the performance effects of employee participation depend on the business cycle. Specifically, the conservative impact of employee participation on strategy may be associated with lower company value in good times, but may also provide a buffer against a loss of value in bad times. This argument is supported by data from 726 European firms in the period surrounding the financial crash of 2006–2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are International Framework Agreements potential mechanisms of cross-border labour regulation? For some scholars they are no more than ‘window-dressing’, for others they are effective instruments of transnational regulation. We argue that their effectiveness depends on their interconnection with other mechanisms of labour regulation. Drawing on a broad review of research and our own empirical data, we conclude that different institutional frameworks, different dominant actor groups and configurations, and also different modes of regulation and bargaining, lead to varying and sometimes contrasting outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article applies sociological neo-institutionalism to help understand transnational trade union wage policy. We review existing approaches to the role of trade unions as organizational actors in wage bargaining coordination and contrast these with the concepts of organizational fields and institutional work. Besides structural and associational power, transnational institutions are also able to increase the ability and willingness of unions to act transnationally. We draw empirical evidences from existing studies on European wage bargaining coordination in metalworking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the impact of financialization on European systems on industrial relations. It assesses two aspects: the growing power of bond markets and the increasing tendency for firms to threaten to ‘offshore’ operations. Such processes are rooted in the very logic of financialization and have caustic effects on the integrity of European industrial relations regimes. The article concludes that the threat to European systems of industrial relations is likely to be enduring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we examine the industrial relations practices of three large European food retailers when they transfer the hypermarket format to other countries. We ask, first, how industrial relations in hypermarkets differ from those in other food retailing outlets. Second, we examine how far the approach characteristic of each company’s country-of-origin (Germany, France and the UK) shapes the practices adopted elsewhere. Third, we ask how they respond to the specific industrial relations systems of each host country (Turkey, Poland, Ireland and Spain). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the variation of vocational education and training systems in European countries. From a survey of experts in 15 European countries, we develop a typology along two dimensions: employer involvement and public commitment. In a second step, we explain the variety of skill formation systems, highlighting the importance of partisan power and economic coordination. The causal argument is applied in three illustrative case studies of Germany, Sweden and the UK. In particular, we argue that a high degree of economic coordination increases the relevance of training relative to academic education. However, differences within the cluster of coordinated market economies are related to different legacies of partisan power in the post-war decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role of the state in industrial relations and the development of collective bargaining autonomy in three Southern European countries. The starting point is the impact of contradictory forces on the direction of change. While there are strong pressures towards less state regulation of working conditions and collective bargaining, the macroeconomic framework of monetary union imposed new coordination requirements upon these economies. Social pacts in the 1990s and 2000s provided a mechanism of state-coordinated governance while at the same time helping to enhance negotiated self-regulation. Nonetheless, significant cross-national differences remained in the extent and form of autonomous collective bargaining and in its outcomes. The structural challenges facing social partners in these countries, together with an emphasis on institutional strategies of revitalization, left them in a weak position at both company and national levels to face the challenges brought on by the crisis. Thus recent developments show a clear pattern of increased unilateral state interference, which raises important questions regarding the future of bargaining autonomy and the role of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the social regulation of diversity and equality that play a key role in policy field in the evolution of "Social Europe".

Labour in Central-Eastern Europe is widely regarded as a uniformly weak actor. We challenge this view, and explore the conditions under which CEE labour can play an active role in the welfare reform process. We draw on evidence from education and health care in Poland and Serbia, and show that public sector unions have largely retained their ability to prevent major restructuring and to defend employment-related privileges of their constituencies. The unions’ resilience is explained by the fact that the public sector in these countries remains sheltered from competitive pressures by delayed privatization, and by the extensive structural and associational power enjoyed by public sector employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We take the 2004 contract between British general practitioners and the government as an example of dilemmas that confront all European health systems. The contract allowed doctors to withdraw from out-of-hours coverage, but enabled commercial providers to enter the primary care market. Our research suggests that the doctors underestimated the threat of commercialization posed by these new contracts. Only after the consequences of the reform became clear they took policy positions against the commercialization which was facilitated by the contract they had agreed. This case is an illustrative example of the way that wage bargaining partners in the health service become involved in the structural maintenance of the system as well as the pay and conditions of their members, with possible trade-offs between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Framework agreements on Telework and Work-related stress present unique challenges to our understanding of the European social dialogue, given that they were the first European inter-sectoral collective agreements to be implemented via 'soft' means rather than legally binding directives. Their implementation and substantive effects were in practice piecemeal; this implies a retreat of the European social dialogue as a viable means of regulating social Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has found that the presence of a union at a workplace is an important individual-level determinant of union membership. The present article, drawing on a multilevel analysis of 21 European countries, provides further evidence which nuances the conclusions of previous studies by introducing and testing institutional moderation effects. Thus, in countries with Ghent systems, having a union at workplace is less important, since probability of membership is already very high. Conversely, if there are extension mechanisms for collective agreements there is less incentive to join a trade union, and this is not compensated even when there is an active union at the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Union density still varies considerably across Europe. This cross-national diversity has inspired multiple explanations ranging from institutional to workplace or socio-demographic factors. In this comparative multilevel analysis, we combine personal, workplace and macro-institutional explanations of union membership using the European Social Survey. By controlling for individual factors, we test the cross-national effect of meso- and macro-level variables, in particular workplace representation, establishment size, Ghent unemployment insurance and a society’s social capital. We conclude that all these institutional and social contextual factors matter in explaining differences in union membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates covariates of union density in ten West European countries. It adds to previous research by showing that collective bargaining coverage plays a substantial role. Hence future analyses of union density should emphasize the collective bargaining coverage variable, since trade unions may influence both the extent of coverage and the content of agreements. Of course, the question of the direction of the causality remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to theorists of Varieties of Capitalism, employers can achieve strong decentralized cooperation on vocational training when there are institutional devices encouraging workers and firms to co-invest in the skill production. Yet numerous European countries, including those where such institutional devices exist, do not rely on ‘spontaneous’ co-investment but operate compulsory training funds and levies which establish obligatory mutualization between employers.The objective of this article is to show that the rationalist theoretical framework of Varieties of Capitalism theory is capable of accounting for such collective financial schemes in the apprenticeship field, but is less suited to capture the compulsory contributions for continuing vocational training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Flexicurity’ has become an influential concept in academic and political discourse, in particular since the European Commission placed it at the core of the European Employment Strategy. However, the concept is underdeveloped and suffers from a number of serious shortcomings. In this article we discuss a number of its problematic features. In particular, we focus on four aspects: its ambiguity and openness to political capture; its failure to problematize the creation of institutional complementarities; its lack of attention to conflicts of interest and to the heterogeneity of the labour market; and its reductionist view of the sources of flexibility and security. We illustrate this discussion with a series of empirical examples. Finally, we conclude that the flexicurity approach should either be abandoned, or be substantially improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee board-level representation is a significant feature of industrial relations systems in the majority of EU member states. Even so, analyses of its impact on company board-level decision-making remain sparse, and very few focus on how employee board-level representatives conduct their relationships with shareholder representatives and maintain their independence from management beliefs, norms and values. This article examines the findings from interviews with 20 unionized representatives in 13 European countries. Representatives reflect on their influence on the board, their relationship with other board members and their achievements and disappointments. The article concludes that employee representation contributes towards a more broadly based corporate strategy by ensuring that it takes into account at an early stage the views and interests of organized labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on labour market policy reform in Western Europe has given insufficient attention to the ‘migrant worker factor’. Concerns about reduced availability of migrant workers, as well as more traditional concerns regarding labour market competition and socio-cultural integration, can catalyze a shift in labour market policy. I present recent cases of reform in the vocational education and training arena in Ireland and the UK, which were partly stimulated by these concerns. It appears that the ‘migrant worker factor’ contributes to labour market policy reforms which increase the role of the state in the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite severe membership losses after the transformation of 1989, trade unions in Central Eastern Europe were slow to develop methods to recruit new members. This article examines how Solidarność in Poland has adopted American organizing approaches, and analyses how an emerging group of young trade union organizers and activists changed the self-understanding of the union. The article ends with a comparative discussion of the conditions which may promote the development of organizing activities in Central Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the conditions under which trade unions in the car industry in Western and Central-Eastern Europe cooperate with each other. It analyses relations between Polish and German unions at three automotive companies displaying variation in the timing and content of cross-border cooperative ventures. Unions cooperated transnationally when no local negotiation channel was available to the German unionists and the Polish unionists benefited more from the assistance of their Western counterparts than from local solutions. Overall, the evidence suggests that East-West labour transnationalism contains a strong element of reciprocity and is guided primarily by cost&#X2014benefit considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]