Rebecca Zahn, New Labour Laws in Old Member States. Trade Union Responses to European Enlargement
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2020.0619 |
| Pages | 162-164 |
In recent years, alongside the enlargement of the European Union to include post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the unremitting process of Europeanisation of labour relations and labour laws has created a series of policy, regulatory and legal challenges for the European trade union movement. Conventional wisdom dictates that one of the effects of the unprecedented levels of migration from the “new” European Member States (where the standard of living, social protections, and terms and conditions of employment were/is/are lower) has been the suppression of wage rates and the dilution of the hard-won individual and collective liberties and rights enjoyed by workers and their trade unions in the “old” Member States. This process is sometimes referred to as “social dumping”, whereby higher wages in the latter are either undercut or depressed by mass movements of labour from the East ready and willing to work for lower wages and inferior terms and conditions. This book provides an in-depth account of how the trade unions have responded to European enlargement, as well as a normative assessment as to how they ought to respond in order to maintain their historical role as an economic and social force that operates as a countervailing power to management.
A few preliminary observations: a particular anxiety of this reviewer is whether “law matters”. Does the law have any meaningful role to play in shoring up and consolidating the position of trade unions in the teeth of such shifting regulatory developments? Another concern relates to the regenerative capacity of the trade union movement itself. Does it have the flexibility to respond to such challenges in light of its growing irrelevance in Member States such as the United Kingdom where trade union membership and the numbers of workers covered by collective agreements has fallen at an unparalleled rate in recent times? It is each of these profound issues, including the impact of the reactions of the trade unions on “new” Member State workers, that this book seeks to address. It does so through the lens of trade unions located in Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden by probing how they “operate inside, around and across the national and EU legal frameworks which regulate them” (2). Without a shadow of doubt, each of these issues is charted and analysed expertly.
Turning to the structure of the book, the introduction clearly sets out the scope of the book...
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