Friday, July 10, 2015
H202B (28 rue des Saints-Pères)
This paper examines industrial relations reforms and changes to labor market governance is six European countries (Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Sweden) with a focus upon the period since the recent economic crisis, but in the context of the wider transformation of class relations across the advanced capitalist world in the last three decades and more. It argues that all these countries have exhibited a similar trajectory of institutional change, a trajectory best characterized as neoliberal. By speaking of ‘convergent trajectory’ the paper does not refer to the homogeneization of collective bargaining structures or other institutional forms, which remain different, but rather to growing similarity in outcomes and specifically to the expansion of employer discretion along multiple dimensions. These convergent trajectories of industrial relations change are a response to a profound shift in capitalist growth models and a change in the relative balance of power of unions and employers. The resultant transformation in national industrial relations systems was well under way before the financial and economic crises that first became evident in 2008 and continue today. However, recent events and new manifestations of crisis have done nothing to reverse the liberalizing tendencies of European industrial relations systems; indeed they have only deepened. For example, recent developments particularly in Ireland and Italy (demise of social partnership and union marginalization) signal a renewed, this time mostly state-led attack on centralized industrial relations institutions and union involvement on policy-making.
