From crisis corporatism to reshaping European labour markets in defence of vulnerable workers

Introduction

This concluding article synthesises the findings of the special issue on how and to what extent social partners and other labour market actors cooperated to protect vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its contribution to the current literature lies in its examination of the opportunities and limits of social dialogue in protecting vulnerable groups in the labour market. It also investigates what types of power resources and institutional structures are required to address crises and tackle emerging inequalities in the context of precarious work and whether these experiences from the pandemic changed established corporatist models in selected European countries and regions.

The article revisits two conceptual perspectives that might explain the role of social dialogue in protecting the vulnerable. The first perspective is rooted in institutionalised power relations in terms of which pre-existing collaborations shape social dialogue even in times of crisis (Brady, 2022). The second perspective is grounded in crisis corporatism, within the framework of which exceptional conditions, such as those created by a pandemic, can generate opportunities – or even necessities – for new collaborations between social partners (trade unions, employer organisations and governments) – particularly in representing and protecting vulnerable groups (Urban, 2012).

The article argues that recent socio-economic and health crises have highlighted the need for robust corporatist structures to protect vulnerable groups in the labour market. Strong institutional frameworks enable cohesive crisis responses, whereas weaker ones leave vulnerable groups exposed. Effective protection, however, requires both immediate mechanisms and long-term strengthening of social protection. The COVID-19 pandemic showed the importance of adaptable frameworks and the prominent position of social actors in advocating for vulnerable persons in the labour market. Future resilience thus requires the development of inclusive corporatist structures and fostering stronger government–employer–union partnerships to represent the interests of all workers.

For over a decade social dialogue has been recognised as a mechanism for addressing the interests of non-standard, precarious and vulnerable workers, a central concern in industrial relations (Kalleberg, 2018; Doellgast et al., 2018). While debates on precarious work (Kalleberg and Vallas, 2017) and labour market dualisation (Carver and Doellgast, 2021; Trif et al., 2023; Lindvall and Rueda, 2013) have advanced our understanding of corporatist decision-making, they fall short of explaining what vulnerabilities mean during socio-economic crises, which factors drive crisis-induced vulnerabilities, and how social dialogue deals with such vulnerabilities in crisis situations. In response to this gap, Boonjubun et al. (2025) conceptualise vulnerabilities in the labour market and provide a rich understanding of how social dialogue responded to both longstanding and emerging vulnerabilities during the pandemic.

The starting point for understanding vulnerability during crises is the notion of precarity, mentioned above. While precarity refers to insecure job conditions, such as low pay or unstable contracts (Kalleberg, 2018; Holubová and Kahancová, 2022), vulnerability encompasses the intersectionality between precarity and broader socio-economic conditions that determine people’s exposure to poverty or social exclusion (Gallardo, 2020; Saunders, 2003). The COVID-19 pandemic deepened existing vulnerabilities and revealed new ones, particularly among groups excluded from employment protection or lacking access to benefits. Conceptualising vulnerability as an intersectional phenomenon (Crenshaw, 1990, 2017) highlights how overlapping inequalities shape crisis experiences (Hankivsky and Kapilashrami, 2020), certain groups and sectors being affected disproportionately (Boonjubun et al., 2023). An intersectional approach may thus explain why persons facing multiple disadvantages – such as an elderly immigrant woman with a disability – were especially exposed during the pandemic. The pandemic also served as a context for the emergence of new vulnerable groups, such as working families with children unable to access day-care, or single households without a family support system, as well as persons in sectors deemed essential, such as health-care workers and frontline workers in retail, transport and services, who could not work remotely. Simultaneously, the pandemic exacerbated the challenges faced by traditionally vulnerable groups, such as single parents, low-skilled workers, migrant workers, seasonal workers, ethnic minorities, the elderly, the disabled and those at risk of poverty and social exclusion (for more see Boonjubun et al., 2023; Nieuwenhuis and Yerkes, 2021; Greve et al., 2021).

Crisis corporatism: the role of institutional power resources and path dependency in protecting the vulnerable

The pandemic increased the urgency for governments to convene societal actors in order to formulate swift responses to pressing challenges (for example, ‘acute emergency coalitions’; see Urban, 2012: 230). The literature on crisis corporatism also points at shifting power relations during crises (see, for example, Meardi and Tassinari, 2022; Ebbinghaus and Weishaupt, 2022), often involving the inclusion of new actors in policy-making. Here, Urban (2012) refers to the ‘alliance of the weak’, highlighting the opportunities offered to ‘new’ actors to influence crisis responses.

While crisis corporatism offers a compelling lens through which to understand COVID-era corporatist policy-making, this special issue starts with a critique of the concept and its limited empirical precision. Specifically, in prior work it has lacked clarity with regard to what exactly distinguishes crisis corporatism from ordinary corporatism during a crisis, and what tangible outcomes it produces. Therefore, in this issue an analytical focus had to be developed to understand how and to what extent social partners were involved in formulating and adapting labour market and social policies, especially those targeting vulnerable groups.

Starting from a cross-national overview of tripartite policy-making across 29 European countries (2020–2022), Singh et al. (2025, this special issue) analysed a data set of 1139 policy measures from Eurofound PolicyWatch. Their analysis finds that the involvement of social partners in designing policies for vulnerable groups during COVID-19 (or the tripartite alliances for the vulnerable, as the authors frame it) was neither systematic nor consistent. Tripartite decision-making was not very common overall, and only relatively prominent early in the pandemic: during the first few months of the pandemic in terms of the absolute number of policies adopted, and in relative terms (as a proportion of all policies adopted) in the summer of 2020. Early corporatist efforts focused largely on employment-related vulnerabilities (such as work retention and short-time working schemes). Over time, the involvement of trade unions and employer organisations declined significantly. By contrast, policies explicitly targeting vulnerable groups were associated predominantly with unilateral or government-led action rather than with tripartite policy-making. Policies targeting vulnerable groups focused mainly on employment-related vulnerabilities, while family- and health-related vulnerabilities were addressed less often, and only in later phases of the pandemic.

There were also a number of regime-specific differences. For instance, tripartite alliances were associated with the targeting of employment-related vulnerabilities in Nordic and Anglophone regimes, and to a lesser extent, with family- and health-related vulnerabilities in Central Europe. Based on this European comparison, we can conclude that while pandemic-driven measures sought to retain employment across major sectors of the labour market, few concrete social protection measures explicitly targeted vulnerable segments. Notably, the self-employed became a focal point in many countries, but they were targeted by temporary emergency measures, often on an ad hoc basis designed to fill gaps in the social protection that predated the pandemic. This evidence is in line with the view that most policy measures were directed at labour market ‘insiders’ rather than ‘outsiders’. This finding was corroborated by detailed insights into national case studies in the special issue. At the same time, it highlights a core issue, namely that the meagre presence of tripartite alliances, and crisis corporatism more broadly, during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals institutional blind spots in both representation and policy outputs when considering vulnerable groups.

The contributions in this special issue confirm this dynamic of identifying new actors and ad hoc advisory bodies participating in crisis-related policy-making. But crisis corporatism is deeply embedded in existing institutional contexts. The empirical country-case studies (Duman et al., 2025; Martišková et al., 2025; Seghezzi et al., 2025; Strigén et al., 2025) collectively demonstrate that the extent to which inclusive crisis corporatism occurs depends significantly on pre-existing power resources and institutionalised collaboration structures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, countries with more equally distributed institutional power and inclusive (formal) practices, such as Sweden, Finland and to some extent the Netherlands (Strigén et al., 2025), were better positioned to enact protective measures for vulnerable groups. In contrast, where institutionalised power relations are skewed, such as in Central and Eastern Europe (Martišková et al., 2025), or where power is concentrated among specific already-organised labour market actors, social dialogue struggled to address the needs of more precarious or marginalised populations. This may not be a surprise, as crisis management generally relies on identifying common ground quickly and often under pressure. While collaboration may emerge from an emergency, it tends to rest on established / institutionalised networks of trust and collaboration, potentially incorporating new actors.

In turn, based on the empirical findings (Duman et al., 2025, Martišková et al., 2025, Seghezzi et al., 2025; Singh et al., 2025; Strigén et al., 2025), we can argue that these strongly institutionalised networks of trust and collaboration might be a necessary condition for crisis corporatism, but not a sufficient condition, in particular in relation to vulnerable groups. The reason is that vulnerable groups are often not represented by the traditional negotiation structures, even in countries with well-established industrial relations and universal welfare systems. The scope for influence by weaker actors, social partners in weaker sectors, NGOs and civil society actors is therefore often limited with regard to vulnerabilities, especially intersectional ones and those newly emerging during crises. In many ways, the primary focus of COVID-19 crisis responses was economic stabilisation, not the targeted protection of vulnerable groups (Singh et al., 2025). Where such protections were extended, they typically stemmed from state interventions or through adjustments to automatic stabilisers within existing social protection systems. As Singh et al. argue, defending vulnerable groups requires attention not only to social dialogue but also to broader institutional factors, including welfare state design and the insider-outsider dynamics of labour markets. Singh et al. also show how in most cases, regime differences remained, and policy implementation was path dependent: countries tended to follow their historical roots with regard to taking action also in crisis.

The national case studies in this special issue further evidence path dependency in crisis responses. In Spain and Italy, for instance, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for a revival of social dialogue, although outcomes varied based on national traditions (Seghezzi et al., 2025). Spain’s trade unions successfully mobilised tripartite agreements and social dialogue forums, enabled by established institutional mechanisms, a strong tripartite alliance and the commitment of social partners and political actors. By contrast, in Italy, government dominance in coordination led primarily to bilateral agreements and ad hoc ministerial measures rather than tripartite arrangements. This comparison illustrates that Spain’s stronger tradition of tripartism allowed for a more robust response than that of Italy (Seghezzi et al., 2025). A similar finding has been demonstrated also in northern Europe (Strigén et al., 2025), Central and Eastern Europe (Martišková et al., 2025), as well as candidate countries Serbia and Türkiye (Duman et al., 2025).

Across all the countries studied, traditional social partners played a central role in negotiations, especially in the early months of the pandemic. However, the inclusion of, in particular, trade unions diminished over time, in line with broader European trends described by Singh et al. (2025). The country-specific articles demonstrate that diminishing inclusion was largely the result of two factors. First, as the major economic measures to stabilise the economy and labour market were often implemented in the initial period, and maintained throughout the pandemic, the main need for social dialogue was met. Second, as the pandemic continued, it became increasingly medicalised, involving the medical management of testing, vaccination, and exit strategies from the pandemic. It was here that new epistemic communities emerged in Europe, namely (bio)medical experts, particularly epidemiologists and virologists (Lohse and Canali, 2021; Gayat and Raux, 2022) to advise governments on their crisis management. Epidemiological models became essential for understanding the spread of the virus, predicting risks and assessing control strategies, as well as coordinating testing, vaccines and phasing out measures. In some countries, this marked a shift from a traditional corporatist focus on economic and labour market concerns to a broader focus on health and safety (see Meardi and Tassinari, 2022). It did not exclude social partners, as health and safety are areas in which social partners also have a stake, but in some countries – for example, the Netherlands and Finland (see Strigén et al., 2025), the influence of social partners weakened with the rise of government unilateralism and the centrality of medical epistemology, particularly in health policy related issues (see also Urban, 2012; Hassel, 2014).

In contrast, other countries featured in this special issue saw their social dialogue structures reinforced through innovative crisis corporatist arrangements. In particular, countries in Central and Eastern Europe (Martišková et al., 2025) provide an interesting case, as ad hoc advisory bodies were called upon to cooperate with the government. In countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia and Slovakia, new structures were formed to address the crisis, but most remained only temporary (with the exception of Latvia). Martišková et al. (2025) argue that the ad hoc advisory bodies were not a success for tripartite collaboration; rather they undermined the role of the trade unions. Contrary to Meardi and Tassinari (2022), the pandemic did not simply provide an opportunity for the revival of social dialogue. It also introduced new challenges for concessional bargaining, offering both opportunities and risks for social partners. Vulnerable groups fared better where they were represented by strong social partners, but the effectiveness of these protections was determined largely by the strength of pre-existing social dialogue structures and/or existing social protection systems.

These dynamics point to the importance of adopting a long(er)-term perspective on crisis corporatism. Rather than seeing it as a static framework, it should be understood as a dynamic process, in which crisis management adapts constantly to the changing policy environment and shifting interests. This adaptation is, however, often constrained by institutional history and path-dependent structures. In some countries it increased the relevance of medicalisation and may have shifted power resources, at least temporarily. It led to the selective maintenance of tripartism, while increasing the unilateralism of the state, as suggested by Hassel (2014) referring to ‘dual tracks’ in reforms a more than a decade ago.

There are important disparities in power resources across sectors. For instance, in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands (Strigén et al., 2025), strong traditional labour market actors constrained the recognition of other stakeholders, such as civil society, perpetuating the insider-outsider divide. This is driving conflict across Europe, as the sectors under pressure, such as health care, rose in resistance. This highlights disparities in power resources between traditional industrial sectors and the service- and health-care sectors, as established industrial relations structures position certain social partners at the forefront while marginalising others. Also, the Serbian and Turkish cases presented by Duman et al. (2025) offer fresh insights into crisis corporatism under uneven power relations. EU candidate countries include both semi-peripheral economies with weakly structured corporatist traditions and centralised administration. They exemplify a distinct political dynamic while highlighting how dominant, centralised policy-making structures can obstruct effective cooperation among social partners. The analysis highlights the crucial role of institutionalised social dialogue in shaping inclusive crisis policies. While ad hoc tripartite measures may yield short-term benefits, they are insufficient without sustainable and well-structured power-sharing arrangements. Sustained and balanced dialogue is therefore essential for protecting vulnerable workers and ensuring equitable policy outcomes, particularly during systemic crises. These cases collectively emphasise that meaningful social dialogue must be embedded institutionally to withstand political and economic shocks.

Taken together, these findings offer novel empirical insights that enable us to better understand the institutional power relations shaping the emergence and limits of crisis corporatism. Focusing on Europe as a whole, little evidence was found of an association between tripartite alliances, on the one hand, and the targeting of vulnerable groups, on the other. Variations did emerge when zooming in more specifically on types of vulnerability, types of social partner and in particular the region of Europe, however. This indicates, as supported by the detailed country case studies, that the distribution and organisation of power among labour market actors fundamentally conditions whether crisis responses will be inclusive. Where institutional channels are open and power resources are balanced, corporatist structures are more likely to adapt effectively in times of crisis. In contrast, where power relations are centralised or distributed asymmetrically, social dialogue risks becoming more exclusionary, or merely symbolic.

Contributions of this special issue

The articles in this special issue shed light on national experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The issue also showed how the dynamics of competition, bargaining and government control, alongside cooperation, were at the centre of crisis corporatism in action. Five years on from the start of the pandemic, these studies offer a comparative European perspective on its legacy for industrial relations actors, the challenges it exposed and the strategies it inspired to address vulnerability in the post-pandemic period. It also offers markers to strengthen preparedness for future crises. To be more specific, these studies make three main contributions.

First, they examine the extent to which and how social partners were able to ‘defend’ vulnerable workers. Corporatist structures enabled rapid responses, with unions, employers and the state negotiating major financial packages and job-retention schemes, such as short-time working, wage subsidies and support for the self-employed. However, genuine ‘tripartite alliances for the vulnerable’ (Singh et al., 2025) were rare. Although the measures cushioned income and employment, they also demanded concessions and wage moderation, postponed collective bargaining and imposed restrictions on who qualified for support. Temporary provision for vulnerable groups – including extended health-care access, sick pay and minimum income schemes – offered short-term relief but they commonly fell short of long-term inclusion. Therefore, it is essential to put in place defence measures, such as strengthening institutional safety-nets, for example, through investments in social protection, occupational health and safety, and workplace protection, before the next crisis.

A second contribution focuses on interest representation under rising vulnerability, understood as a broader and more intersectional category than precarious work. Acting on behalf of vulnerable groups raises questions of entitlement, empowerment and power relations that shape the scope for action (Boonjubun et al., 2025). This perspective helps to explain why crisis corporatism, within specific institutional dynamics, has sometimes facilitated protection of the vulnerable and at other times has resulted in inaction. Strengthening inclusive social dialogue structures before future crises emerge remains important, pointing to the value of investing in social dialogue as a preventive strategy.

A third contribution considers tools for addressing the needs of vulnerable groups and improving their representation. The empirical analyses highlight the complementarity between industrial relations perspectives and those situating crisis corporatism within the broader welfare state. Actor-centred analyses illuminate social partner strategies, but they are incomplete without considering welfare state institutions that shape both the input and output of corporatist responses (Singh et al., 2025). Together, the articles indicate that inclusive crisis corporatism requires effective representation within industrial relations and broader social protection capable of bridging the insider-outsider divide. Most measures taken during the pandemic, however, did not strengthen the permanent protection of outsiders, which calls for permanent frameworks that also include ‘outsider’, that can be activated in future emergencies.

Not surprisingly, the comparison of pandemic responses across countries demonstrates that strong pre-existing industrial relations support successful crisis adjustment. While trade unions have been moving toward representing new, precarious groups of workers (Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick, 2017), the ex post analysis of the pandemic highlights the importance of widening representation beyond core constituencies. Inclusive crisis corporatism depends not only on effective representation but also on comprehensive social protection that bridges the divide between insiders and outsiders. This conclusion is clearly relevant to how unions and policy-makers plan for the next systemic shock. Measures adopted under crisis corporatism reduced the economic impact of the pandemic on many low-wage workers and provided a safety net for those most at risk of poverty, but their benefits were distributed unevenly. Vulnerable workers, including those in precarious employment but also extending beyond this, were often excluded from support measures. Migrants and informal workers were frequently left without adequate financial support (Berg et al., 2023). This exclusion reflects institutionalised power relations, within the framework of which policies tended to prioritise formal employment and capital over the needs of vulnerable groups.

Countries with more centralised and coordinated political systems were better able to implement comprehensive protection, including health-care access and economic relief (Landman and Smallman-Raynor, 2023). By contrast, countries with weaker corporatist traditions and uneven power distribution, such as Türkiye, Serbia, Czechia, Slovakia and Lithuania, developed policy responses centrally and often lacked inclusive measures to mitigate the pandemic’s adverse effects on vulnerable groups. These cases sum up how the scope of crisis corporatism in protecting vulnerable groups within existing power relations depends largely on political will and institutional capacity to prioritise social equity in times of crisis. This provides a critical reminder of what will matter most for equitable responses to future disruptions.