Union Membership Statistics in 24 Countries

[From p. 38] An analysis of adjusted union membership data in 24 countries yields past and present union density rates; the data provide explanatory factors for the differences and trends in unionization

WP 36 - Women's Preferences or Delineated Policies? The development or part-time work in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom

Within sociological and economic analyses of working time, important questions remain regarding women’s ability to combine paid and domestic work. While there is a growing body of research in this area, our knowledge and understanding of the relationship between working, social and private time, often remains limited, in particular regarding the formation of preferences among women with different family statuses. In this paper, we consider the phenomenal growth of part-time work and the emergence of the one-and-a-half earner model in the Netherlands, comparing this to the growth and high levels of part-time work evident in Germany and the United Kingdom. Despite cross-national differences in the development of part-time work, many working mothers, in all three countries, exhibit a preference for part-time work as a second best option for combining paid work and motherhood. This led to a ‘normalisation’ of part-time work in the Netherlands. We show that despite a similar gendered employment pattern and a strong “breadwinner” welfare state tradition, part-time work in Germany and the UK developed under different conditions, making it more difficult to overcome “marginalisation.

Trade union decline and what next: is Germany a special case?

"Dieser Beitrag beginnt mit einem Überblick über internationale Trends bei gewerkschaftlichen Mitgliederzahlen, Organisationsgraden und kollektiven Verhandlungen, wobei ein besonderes Augenmerk auf Deutschland gelegt wird. Der Autor diskutiert dann drei Hypothesen zur gewerkschaftlichen Entwicklung in den letzten Jahrzehnten. Die erste ist, dass Globalisierung und Strukturwandel alle Länder in Richtung einer neo-liberalen Konvergenz beeinflussen, die sich auch im Niedergang der Gewerkschaften manifestiert. Die zweite Hypothese postuliert, dass elastische nationale Institutionen kollektiver Verhandlungen und Gewerkschaft-Arbeitgeber-Kooperationen weiterhin divergente Organisationsgrade in westlichen Ländern ermöglichen. Die dritte Hypothese, die für Deutschland besonders relevant zu sein scheint, geht davon aus, dass Rückkopplungsmechanismen aus internen Unterschieden auf Arbeitgeber- und Arbeitnehmerseite Prozesse der institutionellen Destabilisierung und des Niedergangs auslösen, unter denen Arbeitgeberverbände wie Gewerkschaften leiden. Im letzten Teil des Beitrags wird eine Reihe von theoretischen und empirischen Gründen angesprochen, weshalb die Umkehrung des gewerkschaftlichen Mitgliederrückgangs sehr schwierig ist und eine große Herausforderung für die Gewerkschaften in Deutschland und anderswo darstellt." (Autorenreferat)"This paper commences with a survey of international trends in union membership, union density and collective bargaining, while focusing on the comparative position of trade unions in Germany. The author considers three hypotheses concerning the development of unionism in recent decades. The first one is that globalisation and structural change in the economy and labour market pull all countries towards a neo-liberal convergence of which union decline is one manifestation. The second predicts that resilient national institutions of collective bargaining and union-employer cooperation enable continued divergence in unionization levels across Western economies. The third one, which seems particularly relevant for Germany, states that feedback mechanisms from internal diversity among both employers and workers trigger processes of institutional destabilisation and decline from which both employers associations and unions suffer. In the final part of the paper the author gives a number of theoretical and empirical reasons why reversing union decline is very difficult and presents a major challenge for unions in Germany and elsewhere." (author's abstract

Beneath the Surface of Stability: New and Old Modes of Governance in European Industrial Relations

Despite surface stability, there are significant changes in the modes of governance regulating the relationship between law and collective bargaining as a source of labour rights, and between norms defined at EU, national, sectoral and company level. This article focuses on the European integration process as a key source of change, first outlining the weaknesses of informal coordination of wage bargaining within and across countries, then discussing the tensions for trade unions created by Economic and Monetary Union. It concludes by examining the diffusion of ‘opening clauses’ in sectoral agreements, the displacement of collective by individual rights promoted by EU law and the reduction in statutory standards of welfare and social rights

Reinterpreting social pacts: theory an evidence

Economists have largely neglected the analysis of the relevant factors that induce policymakers and trade unions to sign social pacts, despite their clear implications for economic policies and the functioning of labour markets. In this paper we fill this gap. We build a simple theoretical framework that models social pacts as the outcome of a bargaining process, where the probability of observing a pact is essentially determined by politico-economic factors. Then we test the model using a new and original data set that documents the features of social pacts implemented in advanced economies over the last 30 years.Social pacts, institutions macroeconomic outcomes

WP 67 - The first part-time economy in the world. Does it work?

_*This papers is republished from the first edition in 2000.*_ h2. Introduction In his Adam Smith lecture of the European Association of Labour Economists, Harvard economist Richard Freeman has defined the Netherlands as ‘the only part-time economy of the world, with a finger in the dike of unemployment’ (Freeman 1998: 2). How did it happen? What kind of jobs are these and whose jobs are they? Can a ‘one-and-a-half job’ model work? Is it a solution to Europe’s predicament of unemployment? These are the questions that I will try to answer in this paper. The paper begins with a brief description of the main changes in the Dutch labour market during the past decades. It shows that there was a major reversal of trends on nearly all performance indicators in the early 1 980s. Next, I discuss the role of wage moderation, sectoral change and job redistribution. In section three I shall focus in particular on the role of atypical and part-time employment. Section four concentrates on policies and changes in labour market behaviour and preferences, in particular of (married) women, trade unions, employers and governments. In the concluding part I shall identify some problems associated with the one-and-a-half job model and try to answer the central evaluative questions and title of the paper.