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This article introduces six national studies covering 11 countries of the EU-15, analysing the impact of government austerity measures on the working conditions of public employees and on public sector employment relations. It stresses how international financial markets and supranational actors have altered the dynamics of employment relations in a sector traditionally considered sheltered from external forces. Nevertheless, public sector employment relations remain distinctive compared to the private sector. There has been increased government unilateralism in the determination of pay and conditions, and public sector trade unions face obvious difficulties.

This article examines the reform of public services management in Europe drawing on material from Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. It considers the limitations of interpreting changing public service employment relations in terms of a convergence towards the new public management and outlines an alternative interpretation of these reforms.Since the 1980s there has been sustained interest in reforming public service industrial relations across Europe. The pressure for reform has arisen from concerns about high levels of public expenditure and their potentially detrimental effects on national competitiveness in a more global economy. These macro-economic constraints were reinforced by the Maastricht convergence criteria for membership of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the provisions of the 1997 growth and stability pact, maintaining the pressure on national governments' fiscal policies. Policymakers have been concerned whether traditional patterns of public service employment relations are able to ensure the recruitment, retention and satisfactory performance of public service workers in responding to increased citizen expectations about service quality and efficiency. In most countries the characteristic features of public service employment relations have all been subject to increasing critical scrutiny (Ferner, 1994;Naschold, 1996). Accompanying these developments has been a shift from equating public sector employment relations almost exclusively with the institutions of collective bargaining and legal enactment, towards a consideration of the policies and practices of employers.Alongside the familiar problems of analysing management strategy-the gap between espoused policies and actual practices, the malleability of the concept of strategy, and the ideological connotations associated with the more triumphalist accounts of strategy-additional problems are encountered within a public service

The complex division of labour in health care has encouraged the analysis of occupational boundary disputes between separate professions. Less attention has been directed at the divisions in individual occupational groups but in a context of intensive health sector workforce reform there has been a growth in lower status occupations. This article extends debate about lower status occupations by exploring the manner in which nurses and healthcare assistants engage in boundary work to advance their occupational interests. The UK government's modernization agenda has encouraged a more prominent role for healthcare assistants and the findings confirm that this agenda has reinforced occupational boundary disputes between nurses and healthcare assistants. Tensions between nurses and healthcare assistants took particular forms influenced by gendered notions of caring work. The consequences of these boundary management strategies in terms of work undertaken, pay and status are also explored.

This article examines role redesign in the National Health Service (NHS), which has been central to the Labour government's modernisation agenda, focusing on the role of health care assistants (HCAs). Drawing on data from two acute hospital trusts, this article focuses on variation in HCA roles between trusts, indicating that there may not have been a uniform expansion of the HCA role as the government's HR agenda and most commentators suggest. Although the modernisation agenda has curtailed registered nurses' role in direct care, there are significant variations in the degree to which HCAs undertake a ‘relief’, ‘substitute’ or ‘apprentice’ role at trust level. These variations in HCA role stem from distinctive models of the nursing workforce with differing assumptions about the respective roles of registered and non‐registered nurses. The variations in HCA role have important consequences for the prospects for role redesign and HR policy in the NHS.