The Impact of Collective Agreements on Working Time in Denmark
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00137 |
| Author | Steen Scheuer |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
The Impact of Collective Agreements
on Working Time in Denmark
Steen Scheuer
Abstract
This article examines the impact of collective agreements on the working
time patterns of private-sector employees in Denmark. The expected effect
would be a reduction in working hours and overtime and an increase in
overtime compensation. On the basis of an individual-level survey of 1720
employees, it is shown that there is a clear union impact on working time
behaviour, but that it varies by subject area. While in some areas there is a
near total spillover of rules from collective agreements (the collective
agreement has become a social norm), in others there is a clear `union
mark-down', and in still others collective agreements seem to make no
impact at all.
1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to investigate in a single country the relationship
between (a) collective bargaining coverage and clauses concerning working
time and (b) actual working time behaviour of employees. The insights can
contribute to our understanding of the impact of unions and collective
agreements on actual working time patterns in countries where legislation
plays only a minor role in the regulation of working time.
Three areas of working time behaviour will be analysed and the analysis
will take place along two dimensions:
1. the extent to which the presence of collective bargaining agreements
is connected to (i) a reduction in working hours in the private labour
market to the agreed levels, (ii) a reduction of overtime, and (iii) an
increase in overtime compensation;
2. the extent to which this reduction in working hours and increase in
overtime compensation are extended to ®rms and employees not
covered by collective agreements.
Steen Scheuer is at the Copenhagen Business School.
British Journal of Industrial Relations
37:3 September 1999 0007±1080 pp. 465±481
#Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
2. The institutional setting
In most industrialized countries, working time is an issue of both collective
bargaining and general legislation. In some of these countries legislation
establishes the actual working hours that employers and employees should
adhere to, while in other countries the law establishes a maximum number
of hours to be worked per week (usually 48) and collective agreements
establish what the parties have at present laid down for the normal working
week (for an authoritative overview, see OECD 1994: 143). In Denmark,
however, there are virtually no legal provisions regulating either working
hours or overtime.
1
The clauses that exist all stem from collective
agreements which have a long tradition of being the main Ð indeed, the
only Ð means of establishing the standard length of the working week.
When legislation is absent, adherence to the norms concerning working
time must then mean adherence to the norms and clauses of the collective
agreements. For this reason, a study of working time in Denmark should
enable us to obtain a better evaluation of the impact of collective
agreements upon the actual behaviour of (employers and) employees at
work.
A collective bargaining agreement is between two parties, one of which is
an employer and the other, a collectivity of employees represented by a
trade union. If the employer has joined one of the Danish employers'
associations, then manual workers and some salaried employees are
covered by the collective agreement (multi-employer bargaining; cf.
Sisson 1987: 2±4); alternatively, the employer may separately sign a
collective agreement with a union representing his or her work-force
(single-employer bargaining). If an employer has not signed a collective
agreement, he or she is under no legal obligation to do so: not even a 100%
union membership of employees in the ®rm can force the ®rm into signing.
(Employees in this situation have the right to strike.) Extension clauses,
whereby a minister of labour can extend clauses from existing collective
agreements to all ®rms in an industrial sector, as known from a number of
European countries (cf. Traxler 1994: 172; 1998: 214±16), do not exist as
part of Danish labour law.
As a consequence of this relatively voluntary character of Danish
industrial relations, the private sector in Denmark consists of a consider-
able number of ®rms and employees that are not parties to a collective
agreement, despite having a very high union density. For example, while
the union density of private sector employees stands at 88 per cent,
collective bargaining coverage is only 52 per cent (for manual workers it
is 72 per cent and for salaried employees only 39 per cent, considerably
below half: cf. Scheuer 1997a: 73). The Danish private sector is thus split
almost evenly into those parts covered and not covered by collective
agreements. This makes it methodologically feasible to investigate how the
clauses concerning working time affect the working time patterns inside
and outside their legal scope.
#Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 1999.
466 British Journal of Industrial Relations
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