In the past eight years the Italian system of industrial relations has
been undergoing a prolonged transitional phase (Carrieri and Treu 2013;
Barbera and Perulli 2014; Leonardi and Sanna 2015; Guarriello 2014;
Gottardi 2016). The numerous events that have occurred have changed
some of its traits within a relatively short period. The various causes are
both exogenous and endogenous, economic as well as institutional. The
main exogenous factors are globalisation, the financial crisis and the
economic downturn, as well as interventions by international institutions in
national policy-making. This scenario is to some extent shared with other
countries and is currently exerting pressure on different models of
industrial relations (Katz and Darbishire 2000) towards neoliberal
convergence (Streeck 2009; Baccaro and Howell 2011). Under growing
pressure from so-called ‘New European Economic Governance’ (NEEG),
many national lawmakers – and especially in the Southern European
countries (Rocha 2014; J. Cruces et al. 2015; Leonardi 2016) – have
stepped up deep labour law reforms, with the purpose of reducing the
traditional prioritisation of multi-employer bargaining and the favourability
principle, allowing company-level agreements to derogate in pejus from
higher bargaining levels or even labour legislation (Marginson 2014; Van
Gyes and Schulten 2015; Bordogna and Pedersini 2015; Cella 2016)
