Centralized Collective Bargaining and the Problem of ‘Compliance’: Lessons from the Italian Experience

Abstract

According to the neo-corporatist approach to the “problem of compliance,” worker control over union policy is incompatible with centralized wage regulation, because only associations in which national leaders are insulated from their members are capable of delivering rank-and-file acceptance of wage moderation. This analysis of centralized collective bargaining agreements in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s provides a critical re-examination of the traditional neo-corporatist approach. The author, drawing on archival research and interviews, argues that centralization can be entirely compatible with decision-making procedures in which rank-and-file workers have ultimate decision-making power. In fact, the Italian labor movement's adoption of more “democratic” decision-making procedures, he claims, was instrumental in generating and sustaining centralized collective bargaining arrangements in Italy in the early 1990s.