Industrial relations in Spain – strong conflicts, weak actors and fragmented institutions

Pages725-743
Date04 June 2018
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/ER-08-2017-0195
Published date04 June 2018
AuthorHolm-Detlev Köhler
Subject MatterHR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law
Industrial relations in
Spain strong conflicts, weak
actors and fragmented institutions
Holm-Detlev Köhler
Department of Sociology, Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the development of industrial relations (IR) in Spain
since the democratic transition and analyses the current dilemmas of its social and political actors in the
context of the long-lasting economic downturn.
Design/methodology/approach Combining a political economy, identifying Spain as a particular variety
of modern capitalism, and actor-centred historical institutionalism approach, outlining the formation and
strategies of the main social actors, the paper draws on the broad range of research on IR in Spain and its
theoretical debates, including proper research in the field.
Findings The legacies of the latecomer industrialisation and the semi-peripheral development model still
shape the Spanish economy and IR. The impact of the current economic and political-institutional crisis
affects the entire institutional IR system and its actors shifting power towards the individual employer thus
weakening trade unions, labour rights and collective bargaining. Regarding the theoretical debate on
corporatism, the Spanish case provides ambiguous results. The lack of a coherent institutional system and
efficient political administration limits the effectiveness of corporatist arrangements and reduces them to
contingent concertation strategies. Spain confirms that IR still largely depend on the specific national variety
of capitalism that condition economic development and resources for political exchange.
Originality/value The paper presents an original, theoretical-informed reconstruction of the Spanish IR
and allows an understanding of the current institutional transformations and strategic dilemmas in the light
of historical legacies. Additionally, the theoretical debates on neo-corporatism and semi-peripheral
development are enriched through its application to the Spanish case.
Keywords Strategic choice,Trade unions, Collective bargaining,Corporatism, Industrial relations in Spain,
Semi-peripheralFordism
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The cross-national comparative literature on employment relations is full of triple
classifications su ch as concertation,political isolationand pluralistic fragmentation
(Regini, 1986); contestation, pluralism, and corporatism(Crouch, 1993) or liberal pluralism,
corporatism and statism(van Waarden, 1995), all of them difficult to apply to the Spanish
case for two main reasons. Industrial Relations (IR) in Spain have never corresponded
to one more or less coherent model, but always combined elements of different models often
in a contradictory way. This leads us to our hypothesis that Spain is a fragmented
political-economic regime which lacks institutional complementarities. The second flaw of
these classifications is their exclusive focus on the tripartite institutional relationships,but IR
are to a large extent power struggles and conflicts with strategic collective action and often
contradictory constellations. We therefore opt to see IR as a part of the political-economic
regime as a historically developed and always fragile constellation of social and political
actors regulating the conditions of the employment relationships.
Our approach is very much inspired by regulation theories that distinguish among
fordist accumulation regimes and modes of regulation and post-fordist, finance-led global
accumulation and regulation regimes (Boyer and Saillard, 2002; Grahl and Teague, 2000).
Two main advantages lead us to this approach. On the one hand, it allows us to distinguish
different national institutional systems and, at the same time, link them to general capitalist
development. On the other hand, the relations and contradictions between economy, society
Employee Relations
Vol. 40 No. 4, 2018
pp. 725-743
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-08-2017-0195
Received 25 August 2017
Accepted 30 August 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
725
Industrial
relations
in Spain
and politics come into focus. Although Spain has not fitted in a normalfordist trajectory
due to long dictatorship and late industrialisation, the regulationist framework allows for
the analysis of Spains particular incorporation into Western European capitalism and the
correspondent institution building.
Following Richard Hymans critique of IR as autonomous social sub-systems, we thus
incorporate the approach adopted here into a tradition of critical political economy. This
considers employment relations embedded in a broader set of social and economic forces
that condition the forms of transformation of labour power into productive labour:
The national and transnational dynamics of capital accumulation, systems of power relations,
processes of ideological formation and historically sedimented institutional structures all exert
major determining influences over the micro detail of day-to-day industrial relations. Theory in
industrial relations must be part of a general theory of this totality of social relations of production.
(Hyman, 1994, p. 171)
To avoid frequent functionalist or structuralist pitfalls of these approaches, we insist in
the margins for strategic action and thus the permanent struggle for institutional change.
It is to assume that all actors, and particularly all collective actors such as trade
unions, are never completely determined by system or societal context conditions nor by
internal path dependencies, but always maintain a certain degree of agency or ability to
strategise. However, to understand the strategic choices in the context of multiple
constraints, it is indispensible to analyse the institutional setting and its historical
legacies. These are just some elementary lessons from sociological research in the
tradition of Crozier and Friedbergs (1980) theory of power in organisations and
Giddens(1984) structuration theory.
The following sections are structured as follows. The next section outlines the formation
of the productive model and democratic IR in Spain. The following two sections analyse the
evolution of the productive model and the employment regime during the European
integration period (1982-1993) and the speculative housing boom (1994-2008), referring to
the corresponding academic debates on varieties of capitalism and corporatism.
The inception of the severe economic crisis led to the recent period of a semi-peripheral,
Mediterranean neoliberalism, discussed in the fifth section. A short conclusive section
finalises the paper.
Semi-peripheral Fordism and democratic transition (1959-1982)
Actors and institutions of current IR in Spain emerged during the second period of
dictatorship and the following transition to democracy. The turbulent history of Spain left
little space for historical experiences with democratic and autonomous IR and collective
bargaining. The timid projects to introduce social rights and free associations during
the final years of the restoration regime at the beginning of the 20th century, and
during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1931), in the f ramework of the Institute
for Social Reforms, were soon abandoned (Barrio Alonso, 2014). Only the short and
conflict-driven II Republic (1931-1936) saw the free collective bargaining and association
rights, although always under the pressure and opposition of conservative employers and
social forces, on the one hand, and of radical sectors of the labour movement, dominated
by revolutionary anarquist groups around the National Confederation of Labour CNT
(Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), on the other. With the, after nearly three years of
Civil War (1936-1939), finally successful coup of Francos military for ces against the
Republic fierce repression replaced collective interest representation. All employers
and employees were compulsorily organised in the Spanish Syndicate Organization
(Organización Sindical Española (OSE)) controlled by the state under the fascist principles
of unity, totality and hierarchy.
726
ER
40,4

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT