Trade unionists and academic experts increasingly support the view that European Industry Federations should take a leading role in the Europeanization of collective bargaining. This article investigates whether this is a plausible prospect for the European chemical industry. Drawing on collaborative research between the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) and the European Mine, Chemical and Energy Workers Federation (EMCEF), the article presents a comparative synopsis of industrial relations in five European countries, including recent strategic developments at EMCEF level. The study confirms the importance of national resources and steering power at sector level, especially in relation to monitoring decentralized flexibility. However, despite growing interest in transnational labour cooperation, the conclusion is that progress towards Europeanization is so far modest. More attention in the research agenda, it is then argued, should be directed to how transnational collective bargaining can be achieved.

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rn Janssen (eds.) The dynamics of wage relations in the new Europe Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2000,352 pp. ISBN 0-7923-7742-7 In the socio-economic debate of the last decade wages tended to be considered mainly as either a macroeconomic aggregate or a microeconomic performance indicator. The process leading to European economic and monetary union focused -with respect to the implications for wages -on wage moderation and non-inflationary wage growth, and this implied, in most European countries, a quite generalised loss of interest in any kind of theoretical research on wage relations, employment and working conditions and the level of social reproduction of labour. There was one important exception: France, with the regulation school and the studies of Robert Boyer and Alain Lipietz, in particular, on Fordism, its crisis and post-Fordist societies. This theoretical approach has gradually found supporters among labour economists and sociologists, not only in France, but also in Germany, Great Britain and Italy.Many of the fundamentals of the regulation school can be found in this book: first and foremost the use of Marxian categories (in Lipietz's words, regulationists are the rebel sons of Althusserian structural Marxism), but also the great attention paid to the reproduction of the capitalist system without any anti-capitalist connotation. In effect, the regulationist approach asks instead how can there be regular social reproduction, given the contradictory character of social relations, and how, despite and through the contradictory character of relations, a unity of relations is reproduced.Society and, within society, economic activities consist of a network of social relations. Thus, the wage relation too is a social relation, and a very complex one: it can never easily be determined, for instance, how hard workers should work, at what speed, and for what wage. Social relations are contradictory; consequently, the usual situation might be expected to be a crisis, and the absence of crisis a rather chance event. There are long periods of time, however, when the configuration of social relations that defines capitalism reproduces itself in a stable way. This is a continuing system (a regime) of economic accumulation. In order to achieve a regime of accumulation, expectations and behaviour must take shape in such a way that they are in line with the needs of the particular regime of accumulation. There are two aspects of the process. The first operates as habitus, in the minds of individuals with a particular culture and willingness to play by the rules of the game. The other operates through a set of institutions that may vary widely, even within the same basic pattern of social relations. Wage relations, market relations, and gender relations have, for example, changed a lot over time and remain different between countries. Such a set of behavioural patterns and institutions represents a mode of regulation.