Abstract
As part of its mission to connect academic research to the world of work Transfer tries to stay abreast of public and policy debates, and, where possible, to steer them towards subjects that are likely to preoccupy European trade unions in the coming years. This is well reflected in the three special issues of 2022, in which our editors chose to focus on the impact of COVID-19 on industrial relations, policies to deal with various forms of unemployment, and the challenges of reconceptualising the welfare state in the face of the climate transition. In our final issue of the year, however, we let ourselves be guided by the concerns of the authors who approach the journal with their submissions. This serves as a kind of compass that indicates where the field is heading and what types of issues most preoccupy industrial relations researchers. In 2022, we found that when the headwinds are blowing hardest, amidst the lingering health crisis, geopolitical turmoil and rapid technological change, the compass needle swings true north, towards the fundamental questions of workers’ rights and representation.
For all the talk of deglobalisation, transnational corporations (TNCs) remain the main actors influencing our economies. Their impact on labour rights thus remains an important subject for research. The first article of this open issue, by Nina Pološki Vokić and Maja Klindžić, sets the stage with a wide-lens study that asks whether transnational corporations tend to comply with host-country standards, undermine them, or perhaps contribute to higher standards by ‘exporting’ good practices from home-country institutional environments. This question has caused much debate in the literature, as the findings often vary by country or sector studied. The conclusion offered by this large-scale survey analysis of companies from 28 countries is bleak. Across countries and industrial relations models, the article finds weaker performance of transnational corporations compared with domestic private companies on indicators such as average union density, trade union influence, collective bargaining recognition and the presence of works councils. The domestic institutional environment plays the most powerful role: when local institutions require higher labour standards, transnational corporations comply, but when national institutions are weak, even the transnational corporations from corporatist industrial relations systems abandon their home-country practices.
This implies stark inequalities between workers in different countries, even when they work for the same companies. In Europe, this effect is supposed to be partly remedied by legislation mandating establishment of European works councils (EWCs) and employee representation on the supervisory boards of some categories of European transnational corporations. The literature, however, generally finds only a weak impact of such transnational workers’ bodies on even basic rights to information and consultation (see De Spiegelaere et al., 2022). The article by Sophie Rosenbohm and Jennifer Kuebart adds nuance to these findings by showing that the effectiveness of transnational representation can be improved by pooling resources from different forms of representation – works councils and supervisory boards – through the overlapping roles of individual representatives. These findings are limited by various legal obstacles – for example, confidentiality rules for board members or bans on the simultaneous holding of multiple mandates for employee representatives in some European countries – but nevertheless offer a promising area for research into various ways that could strengthen transnational mechanisms of workers’ representation.
The question has been rendered all the more acute by the recent proliferation of precarious forms of work and aggressive anti-union practices on the part of some global corporations, most notoriously Amazon. Supply bottlenecks and dependence on online commerce during the pandemic turned the spotlight onto the situation in Amazon warehouses, and workers in various locations tried to seize this opportunity to fight for better conditions. Sarrah Kassem’s comparative analysis of the United States and Germany, however, shows that this window of opportunity was no match for the larger and more pervasive structural obstacles that Amazon’s operating model places in the way of unions. In the United States, an unprecedented wave of grass-roots organising has yielded some victories for union recognition, but they remain few and far between. Meanwhile, while Amazon is formally obliged to recognise the existence of unions in Germany, it has so far managed to avoid signing a collective agreement. It achieves this by fragmenting workforce representation through reliance on employer-supported works councils, and by drawing on a seasonal and migrant workforce that can be more easily intimidated into not joining a union. The article thus underlines the difficulties of achieving representation, even in a favourable institutional environment, but also the need for unions to invest in workplace organising instead of merely relying on higher-level institutions.
The fourth article in this issue takes a more conceptual approach to the challenges of representation in an era in which the work relationship is becoming more fluid and fragmented. Yvonne Lott, Clare Kelliher and Heejung Chung show that not only unions, but also researchers find it difficult to capture the full scope and nature of the workforce because of the continued reliance of survey instruments on the traditional employment relationship, characterised by relative stability of employment, contractual relations to a single employer, and fixed time and place of work. While various surveys have recently begun to include questions intended to capture the growing use of flexible working time, multiple jobholding and working from home, their usefulness is hampered by inconsistent and vague terminology that does not usually make it possible to discern the actual extent of these practices, or the power relations that drive their use. Without better data to identify the diverging nature of work practices it is impossible for regulators to design adequate policies and for unions to identify workers who may respond to different methods of organising and may require special forms of protection against discrimination and exploitation.
The ways in which our definition of ‘worker’ impacts the availability of various forms of protection is illustrated most clearly by this year’s winner of the Transfer Young Scholar Award, Ricardo M Buendia Esteban. In his article on recent initiatives to ensure labour rights for platform workers in the European Union he reviews several mechanisms recently proposed at the EU level: a directive on platform work, and guidelines on the application of competition law to solo self-employed workers. Fragmentation of work through digital forms of employment has left many workers outside the scope of standard labour protections, and researchers have struggled to identify even the number of workers involved, let alone different modalities of their employment (Piasna et al., 2022). This allows platforms to play a cat-and-mouse game with legislators in order to avoid the application of labour law by introducing various flexibility clauses, limiting the amount of available hours, and introducing substitution and subcontracting clauses, all in order to give the appearance that their workers are not workers but ‘independent entrepreneurs’. This label, in turn, deprives workers of fundamental rights to representation, classifying their efforts at collective bargaining as illegal under EU competition law. In his article, Buendia Esteban argues for a different approach to regulation, one that would focus less on definitions and more on the assessment of inequality in bargaining power between parties as the basis for determining their need for collective protection.
The question of using EU-level regulation to support workers’ rights to collective representation is also taken up in the EU Policy Debate section, which focuses on the recently adopted Directive on adequate minimum wages. The Directive answers the demand to secure a higher wage floor for all workers in Europe (see also our special issue of Transfer (2019)), but it obliges Member States to put in place policies that will raise collective bargaining coverage to at least 80 per cent. Decades of falling bargaining coverage mean that this will be a challenge in many Member States. To ensure that this ambition does not remain merely on paper, Transfer asked experts from around Europe to discuss what the Directive could do for their countries and what policy options exist to increase bargaining coverage rates. This issue presents the first two instalments of this round table, with Anke Hassel on Germany and Nathan Lillie on the Nordic states. As governments prepare to transpose the Directive and develop national action plans, Transfer will continue to publish reflections on other regional and country cases in future issues.
The EU Directive on adequate minimum wages appears to signal a major shift in EU policy discourse, which until recently emphasised fiscal prudence, labour market flexibility, and competitiveness as preconditions for growth. Recently, however, a number of initiatives have instead focused on bolstering the purchasing power of EU citizens, through initiatives to strengthen national unemployment programmes, minimum wages and collective bargaining, and most recently minimum welfare incomes. One explanation for this shift comes from a new approach to the study of comparative political economy, the so-called growth models approach, which highlights the importance of different sources of demand – including wages – as the key to understanding differences across capitalist systems. For our section ‘Capitalism and Democracy’ we asked Lucio Baccaro, Mark Blyth and Jonas Pontusson, who in 2022 published a landmark edited volume on growth models with Oxford University Press (Baccaro et al., 2022), to present the key innovations of their approach and what it implies for unions and their strategies under different growth regimes. The article paints a picture of a dynamic capitalist system in which domestic struggles over the economy are shaped by regional and global integration, and models of growth that served countries well in previous periods become exhausted and are replaced. Wages and collective bargaining impact both the demand and supply sides of the economy by bolstering sources of domestic demand, and by forcing capital to reorganise and invest in higher productivity strategies for growth. This seems to be, at least to some extent, the philosophy guiding the European Commission as it becomes clear that the EU as a whole cannot export its way out of the post-pandemic crisis. But many things remain unknown. Technological change is imperative in order to meet the climate and energy challenges, but its details remain murky. The diversity of national growth models in the EU ensures that agreements remain gradual, if not elusive, and the scope for productivity breakthroughs in overwhelmingly service economies remains difficult to gauge. We still have much to learn.