The Transformation of Employment Relations in Europe: Institutions and Outcomes in the Age of Globalization, edited by James Arrowsmith and Valeria Pulignano. Routledge, Abingdon, 2013, 247 pp., ISBN: 978 0 415 87593 6, £80.00 hardback.
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| Author | John Kelly |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12078 |
The Transformation of Employment Relations in Europe: Institutions and Outcomes in
the Age of Globalization, edited by James Arrowsmith and Valeria Pulignano.
Routledge, Abingdon, 2013, 247 pp., ISBN: 978 0 415 87593 6, £80.00 hardback.
The ‘European Social Model’ is a familiar concept in teaching and research on
comparative employment relations. Its high level of collective bargaining coverage,
institutionalized role for trade unions in various forms of social dialogue and its
characteristic pattern of high skills, labour market protection, wages and productivity
are often counterposed to the increasingly dysfunctional attributes of the quintessen-
tially liberal market economy, the UK.
The main thrust of this impressive collection is to chart the disintegration of the
European Social Model under a barrage of economic and political pressures and
the concomitant rise of various forms of neoliberalism and labour market flexibility.
The book is organized thematically and comparatively so that each chapter examines
a particular phenomenon, over the past 20 years or so, across a wide range of
European countries, both East and West. The topics covered are employment rela-
tions in the private and public sectors, respectively: systems of worker voice; trends in
wages, working time and work organization; and policy debates about employability,
flexicurity and European governance. Collective bargaining features in many of the
chapters in its traditional roles as a mechanism for distributing a portion of corporate
profits from capital to labour and for providing workers with ‘voice’. Yet increasingly
it has come to play a very different role. Keune and Vandaele chart the dramatic
decline in the wage share in national income and the persistence of wage moderation
despite high-bargaining coverage throughout most of Western Europe. Sisson pro-
vides numerous examples of companies that have used the threat of relocation to
Eastern Europe to negate worker voice and force through major concessions on wages
and work time, while Arrowsmith describes successful attempts by some of Europe’s
largest employers to increase the basic workweek without any increase in pay. Terms
and conditions of employment in public-sector services have been assailed by a
combination of variable pay, decentralized bargaining and most recently draconian
cuts in public services expenditure.
Different authors assign prominence to different causal variables, but overall there
seems to be a wide measure of agreement on the following factors: the liberalization
of financial markets; the shifting balance of power away from organized labour
towards employers, especially multinational corporations; the deregulation of labour
market protections for employees; the decentralization of collective bargaining; and
the increased diversity of the European Union following the accession of the Eastern
European countries. Most authors also note the persistence of many of the core
institutions of the European Social Model, notably high coverage of collective
bargaining and (in many but not all countries) works councils. What clearly emerges
from many of the chapters is a process of reconfiguration in which institutions
designed to balance the interests of labour and capital have become increasingly
subservient to employer and government demands for more precarious and insecure
forms of employment and for wage reductions. The historical dimension in many of
the chapters allows authors to argue that the degeneration of the European Social
Model pre-dates the current recession, although the recession has certainly intensified
the drive to decentralize collective bargaining and weaken labour market protections.
The new member states of Eastern Europe are discussed throughout the book, but
they also have a chapter in their own right. Meardi’s wide-ranging account of the
virulent neoliberalism of Eastern Europe employment relations provides a graphic
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