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After some promise in the 1990s, European unions have grown increasingly disillusioned with regard to the results of EU social policy and EU social dialogue. The paper analyses the extent and reasons of this disillusion by looking at the impact on social dialogue of the Active Inclusion Recommendation launched by the European Commission at the outset of the economic crisis in 2008. The Recommendation led to a tripartite framework agreement at the EU level in 2010 (the only such agreement in a decade), which was then to be implemented at national and regional levels. With a multilevel governance approach, the paper looks at the extent to which social dialogue on Active Inclusion at the EU level, in six EU countries (France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) and six regions (Rhône-Alpes, Lombardy, Lower Silesia, Catalonia, West Sweden and Greater Manchester) within those countries was somehow revitalised. The analysis, looking at both top-down and bottom-up processes and based on documentary analysis and interviews, shows that the initiative displays ambiguities similar to those of typical composite EU principles, such as famously the case of ‘flexicurity’. The multilevel governance of the EU, including the interaction between ‘soft’ employment policies and evolving ‘hard’ Eurogovernance tools, and with poor horizontal and vertical coordination, resulted in multiple distortions of the principle and, over time, to frustration. Unions’ engagement varies by level, country and region, reflecting both traditional national approaches and the local perception of ‘active inclusion’ as an opportunity. Although trade unions were more welcoming of ‘active inclusion’ than they had been for flexicurity, similar related threats and opportunities led to modest achievements and a gradual fading of the idea at the European and national levels, with some more opportunities however at the regional level. The paper concludes that, if trade unions want to engage with the idea of a European Social Model and with Eurogovernance, they could develop stronger networks among regional organisations.

Over the last few years, the European Commission has repeatedly emphasized that, in the face of global uncertainty, the EU has to strengthen its social dimension and foster better working and living conditions for its citizens. To achieve this, the EU wants to strengthen social citizenship by advancing social rights, implementing the principles in the European Pillar of Social Rights at both the European and national level. The overarching objective of the EuSocialCit project, of which this paper is part, is to examine the state of EU social citizenship as well as possible policy scenarios that may strengthen it. This prompts initial foundational questions for the project: what is the nature of EU social citizenship and the social rights associated with it? And, what is the rationale for the EU to be involved in providing social rights? In order to understand the state and nature of EU social citizenship and the role that the EU plays in this now and in the future, we believe that it is necessary to ‘dissect’ the constitutive elements of social rights at the various levels (local, national and EU) at which they are provided. To this end, this paper develops a resource-based and multi-level conception of social rights. With regard to the rationale, we offer an overview of the main approaches that prevail in the long-standing debate on the justification and feasibility of a stronger EU social citizenship and present a synthesis of these approaches that may help further the debate.

After some promise in the 1990s, European unions have grown increasingly disillusioned with regard to the results of EU social policy and EU social dialogue. The paper analyses the extent and reasons of this disillusion by looking at the impact on social dialogue of the Active Inclusion Recommendation launched by the European Commission at the outset of the economic crisis in 2008. The Recommendation led to a tripartite framework agreement at the EU level in 2010 (the only such agreement in a decade), which was then to be implemented at national and regional levels. With a multilevel governance approach, the paper looks at the extent to which social dialogue on Active Inclusion at the EU level, in six EU countries (France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) and six regions (Rhône-Alpes, Lombardy, Lower Silesia, Catalonia, West Sweden and Greater Manchester) within those countries was somehow revitalised. The analysis, looking at both top-down and bottom-up processes and based on documentary analysis and interviews, shows that the initiative displays ambiguities similar to those of typical composite EU principles, such as famously the case of ‘flexicurity’. The multilevel governance of the EU, including the interaction between ‘soft’ employment policies and evolving ‘hard’ Eurogovernance tools, and with poor horizontal and vertical coordination, resulted in multiple distortions of the principle and, over time, to frustration. Unions’ engagement varies by level, country and region, reflecting both traditional national approaches and the local perception of ‘active inclusion’ as an opportunity. Although trade unions were more welcoming of ‘active inclusion’ than they had been for flexicurity, similar related threats and opportunities led to modest achievements and a gradual fading of the idea at the European and national levels, with some more opportunities however at the regional level. The paper concludes that, if trade unions want to engage with the idea of a European Social Model and with Eurogovernance, they could develop stronger networks among regional organisations.

This report presents the results of the Dutch case studies carried out for the project 'networked coordination of industrial relations (NETWIR)'. This project aims to use social network analysis as a tool to gain insight in coordination of collective bargaining in four countries: the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland and Spain. It is set-up as an explorative study, as social network analysis has seldom been applied to study collective bargaining. Therefore, this report should be read as a presentation of results as well as an evaluation of the method of social network analysis to study this topic. We first provide background to the context of industrial relations in the Netherlands and to the means of coordination of industrial relations that have been common over the last decades (section 1.1) and information on a social network approach to coordination of collective bargaining (section 1.2) Next, we give an overview of the literature that applies social network analysis to industrial relations in the Netherlands or use it as an analytical concept (section 2). Thereafter, we discuss the methodology used and describe the process of data collection (section 3), before we move on to presenting our case studies. In section 4, we apply the methodology to two sector cases: the pharmaceutical industries (4.1) and the supermarket sector (4.2). Here we will also present some comparative information from the other three countries involved in the NETWIR project. In section 5 we compare the two cases and section 6 presents conclusions.

In this research report, the contributions of collective bargaining and other wage setting mechanisms to wage equality/inequality in the Netherlands are analyzed. Existing literature, relevant documents, especially those sections relevant to wage determination in collective agreements, and new, unique real wage statistics in depth are analyzed. The investigations focus on the following four sectors of industry: (i) banking, (ii) supermarkets, (iii) the metal industry and (iv) the education sector. Empirical evidences and conclusion: There is little general debate in the Netherlands about wage inequality. The debate focuses rather on the two extremes of the wage distribution: top incomes and very low youth minimum wages. On these two issues, employers and unions take more or less opposing views in the public debate. High cross-sector differences are found in real wage inequality and in the extent to which unions and employers agree or disagree on the way wages are determined and regulated and how they address these issues in collective bargaining. It can be suggested that there is a relationship between trade union memberships and wage equality, although causal relationships need further research.

Attempting to avoid the excessive embeddedness and path dependence considered to have been associated with many past forms of local economic development, authorities are increasingly likely to favour light and fragmented arrangements. Institutions are rarely allowed to have much power, and their structures are frequently subject of reorganisation, even though the component elements that came together to make the reorganised forms are often the same. These governance patterns therefore resemble a kaleidoscope. The authors are critical of such policy approaches. They point out that frequent change prevents learning and the establishment of trust. Paradoxically, the net result is a strengthening of central governmental forces. They consider examples from a range of European countries, concentrating on cases from the UK and Italy. In the latter in particular there is evidence of dissatisfaction with fragmentation on the part of local actors, who often try to establish more substantive structures for steering development programmes.

Almost twenty years ago the Maastricht Treaty introduced procedures for European Social Dialogue, as part of a larger package of measures to strengthen the social dimension of European integration. Through the Treaty provisions (articles 154-155 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union), the European social partners received the competence to become, in principle, co-regulators of the European labour market. The conventional reading of the evolution of European social dialogue since its inception is that it has evolved from a relationship of dependency of the European social partners on the European institutions for the implementation of their framework agreements, towards a more autonomous position in which the social partners themselves take charge of implementation. Since the early 2000s, the argument continues, the social partners have taken a more proactive and independent stance and opted to focus on autonomous framework agreements, and other ‘new generation texts’, including joint reports, recommendations, compendia of good practices, etc., which are not directed at the European institutions in order to secure implementation. In this paper we want to challenge and move beyond this rather linear and one-dimensional conceptualisation of the evolution of European social dialogue. Empirically, we will show that there has not been a straightforward move away from the ‘implementation through Directive’ mode in favour of autonomous agreements. Whereas this may seem the case if we take a view of the cross-sector dialogue only, the picture changes when we have a closer look and include developments in the European sector social dialogue in the analysis. Analytically, we will argue that framing the issue in terms of dependency or autonomy does not do justice to the complexity of relationships that are involved in the European social dialogue and the European sector social dialogue, and in the implementation of framework agreements and other new generation texts. Also it accords little attention to the role of power in the relationships involved. We draw on a multi-governance perspective to analyse the dynamics of European social dialogue, which allows us to capture the relevant multiple horizontal and vertical relationships, or interdependencies, between the European and national, and public and private, actors involved. Interdependency implies the presence of both autonomy and dependence in a relationship, and our central proposition is that these interdependencies simultaneously enhance and limit the capacity of the European social partners to make and implement agreements.

Examines the effects of the crisis on collective bargaining as well as the way unions and employers use collective bargaining to deal with the crisis.

Defence date: 20 November 2006 Examining Board: Prof. John L. Campbell (Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire); Prof. Wolfgang Streeck (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne); Prof. László Bruszt (European University Institute); Prof. Colin Crouch (The University of Warwick, supervisor) PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017 The present study presents a comparative neo-institutionalist analysis of labour market institutions in the Czech Republic and Hungary in the period 1989-2002. It aims to contribute to the contemporary debates on institutional continuity and change, varieties of capitalism, and post-socialist capitalist development. It presents an analytical model combining a variety of elements from different neo-institutionalist schools and applies this model to the two cases of post-socialist institutional change. The analysis presents converging and diverging developments in the two cases, and explains the direction of change. It is concluded that although both countries adopted a series of similar basic institutions, regulating the basic principles of property rights, industrial relations and the employment relationship, institutional reform at the lower levels followed quite different trajectories and labour market institutions limit the role of the market to a much larger extent in the Czech Republic than in Hungary. Also, major differences can be observed both within each case, between different institutional domains, and over time. The change of institutions in the two cases is then explained by the ideas and interests of the (domestic and international) actors shaping these institutions; their power relations and patterns of interest representation; the historical backgrounds of the cases; the international ideational context in which change takes place; and the feedback from different outcomes that the process of change produces. The similarities and differences concerning these factors, as well as the interaction between them, account for convergence and divergence between the cases.

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

QuInnE – Quality of jobs and Innovation generated Employment outcomes – is an interdisciplinary project investigating how job quality and innovation mutually impact each other, and the effects this has on job creation and the quality of these job. The project is running from April 2015 through March 2018. The QuInnE project is financed by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme ‘EURO-2-2014 - The European growth agenda’, project reference number: 649497. Quinne project brings together a multidisciplinary team of experts from nine partner institutions across seven European countries.

Following the seminal work of Richard Titmuss, who coined the term occupational welfare (OW) 60 years ago, the article approaches OW provision in Europe today. We first define OW as the sum of extra‐statutory social benefits and services provided by employers and/or trade unions as a result of employment. We then look at its recent evolution: OW expenditure and coverage have been increasing significantly in Europe since the 1990s. While pensions are still the main policy area of OW, the latter has also advanced in other social protection areas (e.g., health insurance, reconciliation). This has led to four different ideal types of OW— defined on the base of their organizing principle (voluntarism vs. collectivism) and the level of OW scheme coverage and expenditure. By looking at the main drivers of OW, the analysis has found no evidence of a “crowding out” effect between public welfare and OW. Collective bargaining, national political economy, and the timing of reforms prove to be important factors explaining the OW development. As for the present and future of OW, dualization is a major risk. At present, the main fault lines created by OW follow sectoral, industry, company size, and occupational group lines. To avoid the worsening of inequalities originated by OW, even in those countries which were able in the past to avoid dualization, strong industrial relations may play a key role. The article concludes with some suggestions on the agenda of future OW research.

In this dissertation, I study the consequences of motherhood on different facets of women’s labor market outcomes. The main research question is: how does women’s social position moderate the way economic, policy, and cultural contexts influence motherhood effects on labor market outcomes in industrialized and developing countries? I research these heterogeneous effects in four country-comparative. First, I study aggregate labor force participation of prime age women at different levels of economic development (chapter 2). In the remaining three studies, I then research the interplay of country contexts and women’s social position on mothers’ paid labor by studying their labor market participation (chapter 3), their status in employment (chapter 4), and wages (chapter 5). This study contributes to work-family research and the stratification literature by systematically exploring the size of motherhood effects for women in different social positions across labor market outcomes and country contexts. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to knowledge of motherhood effects by testing the same relations across high- and middle-income countries. I show that the relation between motherhood status, social position, and women’s labor market outcomes is comparable across high- and upper-middle-income countries, with more tentative evidence in lower-middle-income countries. Finally, this dissertation critically evaluates the quality and availability of data for such global analyses because it includes a review of the quality of available data for high- and middle-income countries, suggesting comparable measurements of poverty rates and more detailed indicators for early childhood care and education are particularly lacking.