Industrial Relations and European Integration by Hans-wolfgang Platzer Berndt Keller

Author:Hans-wolfgang Platzer, Berndt Keller [Hans-wolfgang Platzer, Berndt Keller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351774390
Google: Rn10DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-24T03:42:44+00:00

The development of bargaining coordination is also documented in Table 5.1. Again, the focus is on pay bargaining. The most important observation is that coordinated wage policies clearly prevailed in Europe throughout the three decades covered, although the form of coordination varied across countries and over time. State-sponsored and state-imposed coordination exhibit the most pronounced fluctuations. State-sponsored coordination peaked first during the mid-1980s, strongly declined afterwards, recovered in the mid-1980s, and reached unprecedented levels of incidence in the early 1990s. State-imposed coordination became less frequent after its expansion from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s. Inter-associational coordination was never frequent and tended to lose ground over time. In contrast to this, the importance of pattern bargaining steadily increased. The incidence of intra-associational coordination was rather stable, whereas the composition of countries changed. Uncoordinated bargaining grew strongly in the last subperiod listed in Table 5.1. This is an outlier rather than a trend, as Finland and Sweden whose bargaining had been uncoordinated for this sub-period, returned to coordinated policies in the late 1990s (Traxler, 2000). The UK is the only country exhibiting a long record of uncoordinated bargaining that dates back to the 1970s and even 1960s. As non-coordination has become entrenched since the early 1980s, the UK also deviates from the European model along this dimension of bargaining.

The larger changes in both the centralisation and coordination of national bargaining reflect major alterations in its economic context. Growing centralisation, as well as the expansion of state-sponsored coordination in the 1970s, were prompted by the first oil shock of 1973, resulting in a governance mode which is widely captured in the literature as corporatist triparti sm. The subsequent decline, expressed in both significant bargaining decentralisation and the decay of state-sponsored coordination, can be traced to the fact that in several countries corporatism failed to cope with the problems of 1973 as well as with the second oil shock of 1979. The rise of neoliberalism was the response to this failure. The shift to state-imposed coordination that paralleled and followed the spread of corporatism was driven by government attempts at compensating for the lack of effective governance within a framework of voluntary incomes policy. The subsequent re-appearance of state-sponsored coordination does not simply coincide with major steps of European integration. As many national case studies show (cf. Ferner and Hyman, 1992 and 1998b; Fajertag and Pochet, 1997 and 2000), this occurred as one constituent of countries' efforts to prepare for the Single Market and EMU.

It is worth noting that this development does not mean the revival of the kind of corporatism which was typical of the 1970s. Aside from differing policy goals, which will be addressed below, there is also a structural difference in terms of the bargaining level. As we have seen, decentralisation of bargaining continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, such that a new, 'leaner' pattern of corporatism has emerged which is characterised by decentralised forms of economy-wide bargaining coordination (Traxler, 2001).

The first signs of decentralised coordination are also observable at the European level.

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