The Decentralization Of Collective Bargaining

After reviewing the rise and decline of the UK system of industry wide collective bargaining, the authors use five detailed case studies to examine the process of decentralising bargaining from industry to single employer level. In each industry management's reasons for withdrawal, the union response, details of the new structures and the experience of operation of the new system are analysed. Finally, the five industries are compared and contrasted and lessons for employers and unions in other industries are drawn.

Tripartism—the national-level interaction among representatives of labor, management, and government—occurs infrequently in the United States. Based on the U.S. experience, then, such interactions might seem irrelevant to economic performance and policymaking. The essays in this volume reveal the falsity of that assumption. Contributors from eight industrialized countries (Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and the United States) examine the changing nature of labor-management relations, with a particular focus on the role of tripartism and the decentralization of collective bargaining. Although nonexistent in the United States and on the decline in Japan and Australia, tripartism flourishes in Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands, expanding beyond traditional corporatist partners to include women's organizations, senior citizens, and other representatives of "civic society." The vibrancy of the coordinating mechanisms that help shape employment conditions and labor policy contradicts the traditional belief that an overpowering unilateral decentralizing shift is underway in labor-management interactions. The contributors show that these mechanisms are in fact increasing in the face of intensified pressures, promoting greater flexibility in work organization and working time.

Within the framework of the new European economic governance, neoliberal views on wages have further increased in prominence and have steered various reforms of collective bargaining rules and practices. As the crisis in Europe came to be largely interpreted as a crisis of competitiveness, wages were seen as the core adjustment variable for ‘internal devaluation’, the claim being that competitiveness could be restored through a reduction of labour costs. This book proposes an alternative view according to which wage developments need to be strengthened through a Europe-wide coordinated reconstruction of collective bargaining as a precondition for more sustainable and more inclusive growth in Europe. It contains major research findings from the CAWIE2 – Collectively Agreed Wages in Europe – project, conducted in 2014–2015 for the purpose of discussing and debating the currently dominant policy perspectives on collectively-bargained wage systems under the new European economic governance.

IThis title was first published in 2003. In the early 1990s, Australia, Sweden and the UK dismantled the old centralised pay setting systems which set the pay of civil servants and adopted decentralised pay systems. Consequently, these systems are now being considered by many other European countries as they look to reform their own systems. Bender and Elliott analyse the outcomes of these pioneering reforms in all three countries and, in doing so, provide the most detailed analysis of the pay of civil servants in these three countries to date. The authors further assess the effect that decentralisation had on the inequality of pay both within and between different departments, agencies and ministries. They identify the differences in the rates of pay growth for the different grades of civil servants that lie behind the changes in pay inequality, and assess whether decentralisation changed the way in which civil servants are paid.

In many EU Member States, the various economic crises of recent years provided grounds for a rarely equalled level of state intervention in the regulation of labour relations with an explicit aim: the decentralisation of collective bargaining. An extensive body of research – summed up and analysed expertly in the chapters of this very important book – reveals that the process of decentralisation has more often than not led to a situation where salaries and labour conditions are ever more frequently determined by direct negotiations between employer and employees, with the State becoming the sole guarantor of employee protection even as it encourages decreasing labour costs to ensure that companies remain competitive. The comparative approach offered in this book adds to this synthesis by providing examples of speci c recent developments in fourteen Member States and Turkey. Among the numerous topics and issues that arise are the following: – ‘opt-out’ clauses that derogate unfavourably from sectoral agreement standards; – extension of the employer’s unilateral decision-making power; – ‘memoranda of understanding’ imposed by the ‘troika’ (EU, ECB, and IMF); and – ‘stand-by arrangements’ imposed by the IMF. However, notwithstanding the strong emphasis on changing the structure of collective agreements by shifting the centre of gravity closer to the company, research nds promise in the reconstituted support for sector-level agreements increasingly found among very small businesses, networked businesses, and work via digital platforms. This is the rst book to take stock of the current state of collective bargaining in Europe. It is an essential study for labour and employment law practitioners, and an exemplary analysis of immeasurable value to policymakers and academics in the eld.

"A summary of findings and conclusions" ([4] p.) inserted.