Patrik Nordin (University of Helsinki, Finland)

The Role of Pan-European Trade Unions and Employer Confederations in Shaping the Industrial Relations in Europe

Europe’s increasing economic integration, which has gathered pace with the advent of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), has raised the issue of a Europeanization of industrial relations, with numerous researchers identifying signs of such a process occurring at intersectoral, sectoral and company levels, both nationally and transnationally (see Soskice and Iversen 1998; Strøby Jensen et al 1999; Marginson and Schulten 1999; Carley 2001). Previous studies have found a growing deployment of cross-country comparisons of pay, working conditions and employment practice in established bargaining arrangements at sectoral and enterprise levels within each country, and the development of forms of bargaining coordination at pan-European level (Dølvik 2002). So far the emphasis has been on implicit forms of coordination, the use by employers and trade unions in international comparisons or developments in other countries, like benchmarking in sectoral and enterprise-level bargaining. Explicit coordination i.e. formal coordination of the bargaining agenda across borders and collective agreements where terms are expressly contingent on developments in other countries is less widespread. Bargaining cooperation, through exchanges of information, is rather more widespread than direct bargaining coordination.

This article looks into the institutional mechanisms and strategies pan-European trade unions and employer confederations have to contribute the policy making of pan-European industrial relations system and possibilities for explicit coordination of collective bargaining across the borders. This is done by using new institutionalism and the theory of institutional change as frame of reference to analyse the changes that have happened in the pan-Europeanization process of industrial relations system from the institutional point-of -view.