De-Constitutionalising Collective Labour Rights: The Case of Greece

Abstract

De-Constitutionalising Collective Labour Rights: The Case of Greece Since 2010, multiple waves of EU/IMF-imposed legislative reforms have led to extensive deregulation or 'de-construction' of Greek collective labour law. While there are many accounts of the Greek reforms, no systematic attention has been devoted to the following paradox: how is such a de-construction possible, in a jurisdiction enjoying a strong domestic constitutionalisation of labour rights, and apparently observing multiple transnational collective labour rights, derived from the CFREU, ECHR, and ILO Conventions? This article sets out to investigate the constitutional dynamics behind the process termed here as 'deconstitutionalisation' of collective labour rights. It seeks to add two contributions to the existing literature. Firstly, taking its cue from Eric Tucker's mapping of multi-level 'capital' and 'labour' constitutions developed in the Canadian context, it suggests that the Greek case of de-constitutionalisation is the cumulative result of a specific configuration of interactions between 'aggressive' EU-IMF conditionality at the level of transnational capital rights, and 'defensive' articulation of labour rights at domestic and transnational levels. As will be seen, these interactions disguise an asymmetric clash between a strong constutionalisation of capital rights at transnational level, and a weak constitutionalisation of labour rights at both transnational and domestic levels. Secondly, the article projects the Greek case onto the broader constitutionalisation debate, which questions the desirability of constitutionalising collective labour rights as an effective response to neo-liberal policies and laws. While submitting that the Greek developments support the sceptical side of this debate, especially by providing a continental European confirmation of Tucker's thesis, the article offers several new reflections of relevance to the constitutionalisation debate.

Trade Unions in the European Union

“…This term captures the close entanglement of a process of neoliberal restructuring (Karamessini 2009; Kennedy 2016) with the discursive hegemony of European Union (EU)/ Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) membership obligations. While EMU entry was initially presented in the late 1990 and early 2000s as conditioned upon wage moderation and structural reforms, after 2010 its retention was more dramatically conditioned upon extreme austerity and the deconstruction of the protective character of Greek labour law (Katsaroumpas 2018;Koukiadaki and Kokkinou 2016a). This highly volatile conjuncture, juxtaposing periods of 'thickened history' (Beissinger 2002: chapter 4) -in the form of episodic bursts of legislative, political and social-movement activity (May 2010-2014) -and periods of relative stability (2000-May 2010 and 2015-2020) presented a challenging environment for unions.…”

“…This chapter seeks to complement the extensive literature on trade unions in Greece from the perspective of 'Hyman's triangle' (Bithymitris and Kotsonopoulos 2018;, the power resource approach (Vogiatzoglou 2018), social-movement theory (see Malamidis 2021) and grassroots unionism (Kretsos and Vogiatzoglou 2015). There is also an extensive labour-law literature documenting the far-reaching post-2010 deconstruction of the protective character of Greek collective labour law and the associated use of law to restrict unions' functional space (Katsaroumpas 2018;Koukiadaki and Kokkinou 2016a;Papadimitriou 2013;Yannakourou and Tsimpoukis 2014).…”

“…It is illustrative that during 2007-2009 GSEE sourced more than 95 per cent of its income from OEE compared with the miniscule 1 per cent that came from the subscriptions of affiliated members (Table 13.3). This regime was subjected to an external challenge by the 'capture' of the Greek state IMF/ EU-imposed conditionality established during the Greek debt crisis (Katsaroumpas 2018;Koukiadaki and Kretsos 2012). Memorandum II identified OEE as a 'non-priority social expenditure' and demanded its termination (European Commission 2012: 110).…”

“…The post-2010 crisis period witnessed a radical transformation of the legal context. Successive waves of EU/ IMF-imposed reforms that interfered directly in collective bargaining and its preconditions (Koukiadaki and Kokkinou 2016a;Katsaroumpas 2018) meant that unions' institutional security was eroded significantly. This was particularly the case with GSEE, following the attacks on the National General Collective Agreements as a universal minimum wage-setting system.…”