Interest Groups in Disjointed Corporatism: Social Dialogue in Greece and European ‘Competitive Corporatism’

Abstract

The article explores the strategic and political parameters influencing the ways in which the main economic interest groups become involved in policy in contemporary Greece. The fact that social dialogue in Greece remains an exercise with a limited scope has been largely due to the fact that there is a difficult match between Greece's 'disjointed corporatism' and the EU's emerging 'competitive corporatism'. A number of European trade unions have agreed to a new 'competitive bargain', which is asymmetrical but which gives them the opportunity to get involved in 'competitive corporatism'. Greek responses to this trend have been inconclusive: while there are clearly pockets within union leaderships which would welcome the opportunity to approve the basic liberalising goals in exchange for guarantees for established workers and participation in the political framing of their implementation, the structural features of the Greek interest intermediation system work against such a possibility. Whether this leads to an evolving 'segmented pluralism' or another form remains to be seen -the extent of the synchronicity of developments with other EU states will depend in part on the outcome of this transition. In previous decades, the country's transition from asymmetric state corporatism to disjointed corporatism went through the contours of an embracing strategy of Europeanisation. It is an open question whether an equivalent strategy for the twenty-first century will be able to restructure the sociopolitical scene.

Public-private wage duality during the Greek crisis

“…This fragmentation, along with a tradition of clientelism and pork-barrel politics in the country (Lavdas, 2005), allowed individual public sector unions to pursue particularistic privileges, including non-competitive pay-raises (through the implementation of so-called "special pay scales" and the provision of different bonuses and pay-increments even to similar occupations across different Ministries), which resulted in a rather disparate web of non-uniform pay-scales and fragmented pay determination systems (GMIA, 2011). In result, public sector employees with identical skills and job content often earned very different wages across different segments of the public sector -and almost invariably significantly higher wages than their private sector counterparts even in similar sectors and occupations (Christopoulou and Monastiriotis, 2014).…”

Lost in the Ocean of Deregulation?

“…Furthermore, historical and political conditions promoted a peculiar interconnection between first-class union leaderships and strong bourgeois political parties based on a post-dictatorship social democratic consensus and an "exchange of gifts," the price of which has been an increasingly precarious workforce (Ioannou, 2000;Kretsos, 2011). Other scholars maintain that trade unions were "colonized" by strong political parties that imposed their clientelistic logics through interpersonal connections with union leadership and distinctive organized trade union fractions (Lavdas, 2005). Thus, although trade unions challenged sometimes significant efforts of marketization in the pre-crisis period through strike action (e.g proposing social security reforms in 2003), they remained among the main stakeholders of the mainstream political and institutional order in Greece, reflecting the public discourse and perception of trade unions as "political dinosaurs.…”

Origins of Embedded Orthodoxy: International Cooperation and Political Unity in Greece

“…But without the type of history that characterised its wealthier partners in the EU, in which relatively early industrialisation created cross-class coalitions that willingly embraced strategies of mutual accommodation and compromise, Greece was never a strong candidate for premier membership in the corporatist club. Moreover, because state-orchestrated corporatism, to the extent that it has been practised, has been a vehicle for clientelism in Greece rather than one through which broad social compromise has been elicited, it acquired a 'disjoint' character instead of the more cohesive variety familiar from small Western European countries (Lavdas, 2005). Policy proposals developed in tri-partite contexts have rarely been implemented, and Greece has experienced extensive coordination failures in the labour market.…”