Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour market

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has made reforming the Italian labour market a priority for his government. Chiara Benassi and Niccolo Durazzi assess the argument that Italy’s trade unions are an obstacle to such reforms on the basis that they support only their core membership, rather than a broader agenda which includes ‘atypical’ workers such as agency staff. They argue that unions have taken on a much broader stance than they are typically credited with and that if Renzi is serious about reforming the country’s labour market it would be beneficial to work with unions rather than against them

Collective Bargaining

[Excerpt] In this chapter, we first present an overview of different forms of collective bargaining, looking at how institutions and models differ across countries. This is the basis for a review of research examining the integrative or efficiency-enhancing role of collective bargaining - which typically emphasizes strategic choice and mutual gains, and studies focusing on the distributional consequences of these institutions - which place more emphasis on the role of power and conflict in shaping bargaining processes and outcomes. We argue that research focusing on performance outcomes provides a useful but incomplete set of tools to analyze the form and consequences of collective bargaining institutions. These institutions have historically played a central role in redistributing political and economic power within workplaces, industries, and societies. Attention to contemporary changes in labor power can help to explain why and how this distinctive form of employee voice has been weakened within different national contexts

Going up-skill: exploring the transformation of the German skill formation system

The German skill formation system has been undergoing significant changes over the last two decades and most recently we observed massive expansion of higher education vis-à-vis the ‘traditional’ dual vocational training, which stands in contrast with the notion of equilibrium that has accompanied the German skill formation system in the literature. Yet, while the institutional underpinnings of the traditional model have been subject to comprehensive scrutiny and theorisation – including analyses of recent patterns of change – it remains unclear what arrangements have become institutionalised as skill formation ‘moves up’ from the dual vocational training to the university system. The article suggests that a (dominant) pattern of state coordination co-exist with a segmentalist pattern: the state mobilized resources and coordinated the provision of high skill formation to the benefit of all companies and in particular of small and medium sized enterprises that have relatively fewer resources and capacity to train; in parallel, large firms, with more resources and a large internal labour market, met their high skill needs also without state-mediation, by establishing direct relationships with higher education institutions through dual study programmes

Explaining divergent bargaining outcomes for agency workers: the role of labour divides and labour market reforms

Under what conditions can unions successfully regulate precarious employment? We compare the divergent trajectories of collective bargaining on agency work in the Italian and German metal sectors from the late 1990s. We explain the differences by the interaction between trade unions’ institutional and associational power resources, mediated by employers’ divide-and-rule strategies and by union strategies to (re)build a unitary front. In both countries, the liberalization of agency work allowed employers to exploit labour divides, undermining unions’ associational power and preventing labour from negotiating effectively. However, while Italian unions remained ‘trapped’ in the vicious circle between weak legislation and fragmented labour, German unions were able to overcome their internal divides. The different degree of success depended on the nature of the divides within the labour movements

Theoretical and empirical links between trade unions and democracy

This special issue wants to honour the memory of Giulio Regeni, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge who was assassinated while he was conducting field research on independent trade unions in Egypt. This introduction and the following articles focus on the theoretical, empirical and methodological questions at the core of Regeni’s research. Unions have traditionally been regarded as crucial for representing the interests of the working class as a whole and for building and sustaining industrial and political democracy; however, there is a debate about the conditions under which unions can be effective, and the role of unions’ internal democracy is particularly controversial. The article discusses the theoretical linkages between trade unions, democratization and union democracy and concludes with a reflection on the new concerns about the risk of conducting field research on these issues raised by Regeni’s death