Saturday, April 16, 2016
Concerto A (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Research on unions in recent decades has underscored the weakening of collective bargaining and highlighted a trend towards greater employer discretion. However, amidst the trend line towards weakening labor institutions, there has been a broad range of differing trajectories in the politics of pay inequality between high and low paid workers This paper studies wage bargaining institutions in Italy and Sweden, two countries in the past have had exceptionally strong active egalitarian measures, in the post-dismantlement, 1995-2015 time frame. Despite the onslaught of challenges to the role and format of collective bargaining, entrenched practices in both cases formed the platform for new initiatives and shaped the magnitude of resilience of these institutions. Drawing from fieldwork interviews, the paper traces the influence of institutional legacies on the activation of egalitarian remnants and coalition formation. The paper finds that the type of skill-level aggregation embedded within institutional frameworks shapes distributional conflict, even in the absence of radical active egalitarian measures. Specifically, the form of interest aggregation influences the sustainability of seemingly neutral anchoring mechanisms sustaining relative wages of the lower-paid. Furthermore, the content of debates about inequality, the assemblage of emerging coalitions, and evolving pay dynamics are marked by aggregational traits of collective bargaining institutions.
