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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.

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.

QuInnE Working Paper No.6. 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.; WP 6 : Virtuous circles between innovations, job quality and employment in Europe? Case study evidence from the manufacturing sector, private and public service sector, CHAPTER 7 : The digitisation of warehousing work. Innovations, employment and job quality in French, German and Dutch retail logistics companies – pp. 278-332.

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.