Transmission Belts of Transnational Competition? Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining in the Context of European Integration

Abstract

Collective bargaining has in the past set a floor to competitive undercutting of wages and employment conditions, acting as a source of `industrial citizenship'. European economic integration threatens to initiate a neo-liberal regime and to undermine national structures of collective regulation. Trade unions seem compelled to acquiesce in the policies of individual companies striving to survive in the face of intensified market forces. The authors suggest that unions can escape their current dilemmas only through developing new forms of political intervention aiming at the creation of effective European procedures of employment regulation.

Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies

“…In the 1990s a significant literature predicted the breakdown of centralized bargaining through competitive deregulation (Flecker and Schulten 1999; Kapstein 1996; Katz and Darbishire 1999; Mahnkopf and Altvater 1995; Martin and Ross 1999). The core logic behind these predictions ran roughly as follows.…”

The Europeanization of Labour: Structure before Action

“…Nonetheless, the outcomes of attempts to establish EWCs at these companies are not atypical. xxi Industrial Relations Europe, December 1994: 3. xxii See European Industrial Relations Review 256, May 1995: 18. xxiii For a useful perspective on this possibility, see Mahnkopf and Altvater (1995).…”

Disrupting the European Crisis: A Critical Political Economy of Contestation, Subversion and Escape

“…Finally, movements such as the PAH must also be understood as a form of societal class struggle in which people are mobilised as 'those who are proletarianized and exploited in every aspect of their lives -at risk of foreclosure and unemployment, diminishing futures, increasing debts, and accelerated dependence on a system that is rapidly failing' (Dean 2012: 57). This implies new political and strategic options beyond the limitations imposed on mass protest by organised workers in the era of disciplinary neoliberalism (for the limitations see exemplarily Mahnkopf and Altvater 1995;Gindin 2012). Collective forms of organising and 'small big victories' established succesful structures -mostly outside the workplace and in the sphere of social reproduction -'through which workers can overcome their debilitating fatalism and gain the confidence to 'concretize hope'' (Gindin 2012: 34).…”