Social (investment) Partners? Trade Unions and the Welfare State for the Knowledge Economy

Social investment states can be understood as sets of policies aimed at the formation, mobilisation, and updating of human capital. At first sight, therefore, unions should wholeheartedly support these policies to the extent that these have the capacity to ease the transition to a high-skill / high-wage knowledge-based economy. Yet, social investment policies might also be a threat for unions: they might for instance weaken traditional social policy areas where unions enjoy strong influence; they might be of primary benefit to constituencies outside the main unions’ representational domains; or more broadly they might be perceived as part of policy packages that, above all, aim at deregulating the labour market. Under what circumstances, then, should we expect (which) unions to support (which) social investment policies? This paper provides a theoretical framework to tackle this question. Mirroring Korpi’s tripartite categorisation of employers’ support for social policy, we expect unions to be potentially (i) protagonists; (ii) consenters; or (iii) antagonists in the development of social investment policies. We suggests that unions’ preferences and agency will fall in one of the three categories according to how they respond to two basic trade-offs (and their interaction), namely a representational trade-off and an institutional trade-off. Cluster analysis is used to identify which unions are more likely to be exposed to these trade-offs and case studies covering the role of unions in a variety of social investment-oriented reforms across Western European countries are carried out to show how the hypothesised trade-offs manifest themselves in the policy process.