Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick - Trade Unions in Western Europe: Hard Times, Hard Choices

Trade Unions in Western Europe

This page intentionally left blank

Trade Unions in

Western Europe

Hard Times, Hard Choices

Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick

and

Richard Hyman

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick and Richard Hyman 2013

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

First Edition published in 2013

Impression: 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013939266

ISBN 9780199644414

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

To the memory of Georges Debunne (19182008) and Jack Jones (19132009), inspirational European trade unionists

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

For several decades, trade unions in Europe have been on the defensive. They have lost membership, sometimes drastically. Their collective bargaining power has declined, as has their infl uence on government and, in some countries, their public respect. Unions in western Europe achieved their greatest socio-economic status half a century ago, in the context of large-scale industrial production (Fordism) and the rise of the Keynesian welfare state.

Leading employers were national champions, and national governments self-evidently shaped social and economic policy; it seemed obvious that unions were a crucial actor in a triangular relationship.

Today the landscape has changed irrevocably. Governments profess their inability to resist the dictates of global economic forces; major companies are almost universally transnational in ownership and in their production strategies; trade unions are often disoriented. Many show obvious uncertainty as to their role in the 21st century, giving rise to internal confl icts. Some observers ask whether unions remain relevant socio-economic actors. But hard times can stimulate new thinking and hence provide new opportunities; the challenge is to review unions purposes and priorities and to devise new ways of achieving these. This can involve hard choices: not all objectives can receive priority, particularly when resources are scarcer. In our view, participation in the search for effective responses is a key task for socially responsible researchers.

Why do we insist that trade unions are (still) important subjects for sci-entifi c analysis? First, unions provide a collective voice through which employees can counter unilateral, and potentially autocratic, management control ( Freeman and Medoff 1984 ); they bring a measure of democracy to the employment relationship. Second, they constitute a form of countervail-ing power to the socio-economic dominance of capital ( Galbraith 1952 ); this function is even more important, if also far more diffi cult to perform, in an era of multinational corporations (MNCs) and the fi nancialization of the global economy. Third, unions are, at least potentially, a sword of justice ( Flanders 1970 ): they have historically fought to defend the weak, vulnerable, and disadvantaged, have expressed a set of valuesor moral economy ( Thompson 1971 )in opposition to the dominant dehumanizing political economy, and have offered aspirations for a differentand betterform of society.

vii

Preface

This book is the main outcome of a research project for which we received funding between 2006 and 2009 from the Danish Social Research Council ( Forskningsrdet for Samfund og Erhverv ), enabling us to undertake our fi eldwork. The original aim was to address trade union responses to globalization. It soon became obvious that this defi nition was both too broad and too narrow. Too broad, in that globalization is a portmanteau concept with no agreed defi nition: it can be stretched to encompass virtually every major social and economic trend. Too narrow, in that unions face many challengesthe diffi culty of recruiting younger workers, to give just one examplewhich it would be far-fetched to attribute primarily to globalization. Our research developed in line with the unfolding global fi nancial and economic crisis: this was inevitably the main preoccupation of many participants in our fi eldwork, becoming a dominant background theme to the research. Since we focused on different countries at different phases of the crisis, comparative analysis became particularly challenging.

Our study includes larger and smaller countries from each of the four commonly identifi ed varieties of west European capitalism: in the Nordic case, Sweden and Denmark; the central group of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Belgium; in southern Europe, France, and Italy; and the

liberal market economies of Britain and Ireland. It would have been valuable to include countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but the limitations of our linguistic abilities precluded this: we strongly believe that serious comparative research requires the capacity at least to read the languages of the countries covered.

In each country we recorded interviews with key offi cials at confederal level and in sectoral unionsnormally including metalworking and public servicesand in some cases at regional as well as national levels. This provided a range of perspectives, but certainly not a full picture. Normally the interviews were in the relevant national language. We also interviewed aca-demic experts and other informed observers. Beyond this, we accumulated a large volume of primary documentation as well as digesting a mass of secondary literature. Studying trade unions, which are elaborate social organizations with often opaque internal political dynamics, in ten countries at a time of economic turmoil has involved issues of some analytical complexity. To return to the initial conception of our project, economic internationalization has clearly been a source of many of the key challenges facing trade unions, but change in industrial relations is not so much driven by the juggernaut of global product markets but is the result of a complex interaction of markets, institutions and actors ( Kelly 2012 : 354). In the book that follows we viii

Preface

have attempted to do justice to this complexity, while also seeking to identify broad general trends and processes.

We are very grateful to the Forskningsrd for its fi nancial support, and to our colleague Steen Scheuer, now at Syddansk Universitet, who was the main award holder. Without the cooperation of our interview partners who willingly gave of their time, often when themselves under great pressurewe recall one general secretary who had to interrupt our conversation in order to take a call from the prime ministerthis study would have been impossible, and we offer our profound gratitude. We also record special thanks to Stefania Marino, who provided major assistance with our research in Italy and compensated for limitations in our command of the language. Finally, we thank Heiner Dribbusch, Roland Erne, Janine Goetschy, John Kelly, Salvo Leonardi, Guglielmo Meardi, Steen Scheuer, and Kurt Vandaele, who made valuable comments on a draft of this book. The usual disclaimers apply.