The Restructuring of Wage-Setting Fields between Transnational Competition and Coordination

Abstract

This article addresses the restructuring of wage-setting institutions in social services in Austria and Germany and seeks to better understand the forces shaping their changes and continuities. Social services include a wide range of services such as labour market policies or elderly care provided by state, private for-and non-profit organisations. Despite similar pressures resulting from European and national politics of economic liberalisation and austerity and the emergence of transnational corporations and labour migration wage-setting in social services turned out to follow different institutional paths. This article expands conventional theorising by using a social field perspective to uncover the role of (institutionalised) power relations and conflict dynamics in shaping the wage-setting institutions. While existing institutions and particular power relations between regional and national actors helped create a common wage-setting field in Austrian social services, the interactions between national and regional, and, to a lesser extent, transnational field participants have led to fragmented and still contested institutions of wage setting in German social services. Keywords

Lifelong learning, young adults and the challenges of disadvantage in Europe Lifelong learning, young adults and the challenges of disadvantage in Europe , by John Holford, Pepka Boyadjieva, Sharon Clancy, Günter Hefler, Ivana Studená, 2023, 467 pp., £34.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-3-031-14111-9. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

“…We analyse three examples of recently founded youth-led social movement organisations aimed at improving the employment conditions of young workers. In the next section, we present a framework for analysing the position of novel social movement organisations within countries' specific industrial relation systems, which we understand respectively as particular organisational and social fields (Pernicka et al, 2018(Pernicka et al, , 2019. We then present case vignettes of social movement organisations in three different countries (Austria, Spain's Basque Region, and Slovakia) with highly diverse industrial relations systems.…”