This article explores how collective bargaining addresses workforce ageing by comparing sectoral agreements in Italy and the Netherlands. The study investigates whether workers aged 55 and over are effectively represented in sectoral bargaining and what regulatory logics underpin age-sensitive provisions. Through a systematic content analysis of the most representative sectoral agreements in both countries, complemented by interviews with unions and employers' associations, the paper identifies five bargaining logics - defensive, transformative, symbolic, adaptive, and exit-oriented - and maps how they emerge across institutional contexts. The findings reveal that Dutch agreements contain a high number of age-related provisions primarily guided by an adaptive logic aimed at sustaining employability through organisational adjustments, while Italian agreements include fewer clauses, most of which are symbolic. The paper explains differences by considering the interaction among three causal packages based on the Varieties of Capitalism literature, the Power Resource Approach, and Ideational Institutionalism. The analysis shows that strong coordination and shared ideas about senior workers as valuable resources enable more proactive bargaining, whereas fragmented systems and a perception of senior workers as close to retirement limit regulatory innovation. The article concludes by highlighting the need for more substantive strategies to address demographic change through collective bargaining.
This paper analyses the role of employment relations in squaring the care trilemma in Italy and Spain. These two countries exhibit similar welfare states and care models, characterised by familistic traditions alongside relatively strong industrial relations systems with encompassing, centralized collective bargaining structures. These institutions, which correlate strongly with labour power and good working conditions, haven't precluded their deterioration in care provision, hence perpetuating a pattern of twofold dualization, where subsectoral differences between early childhood education and care (ECEC) and long-term care (LTC) services persist in addition to the longstanding public/private divide. Institutional and actor-based explanations should be considered when accounting for differences along the dualization axis. In particular, the fragmentation in trade unions and employer organisations, combined with outsourcing practices in the public sector, has contributed to maintaining the private/public divide in the two subsectors and countries. Finally, the article shows that, although both countries display a similar dualized pattern in addressing the care trilemma, the intensity of these divides varies between them.
This introductory article to the Special Issue 'Social Dialogue in Care Services' examines how European countries have addressed the 'care trilemma' - balancing service coverage, fiscal constraints, and job quality - in early childhood education and care (ECEC) and long-term care (LTC). Despite the expansion of care services across Europe over the past two decades, labour shortages have become widespread. Building on the care trilemma framework, the article investigates the institutional determinants of this paradox and the role of industrial relations in shaping labour market outcomes in the care sector. The analysis combines quantitative evidence from 22 European countries with qualitative insights from seven country case studies presented in this Special Issue. The findings show that most countries have addressed the care trilemma through 'low road' strategies: increases in public expenditure and service coverage have often been accompanied by stagnating or deteriorating job quality, reflected in low wages and high work intensity. Overall, the article shows that variations in the resolution of the care trilemma are explained less by levels of public expenditure alone than by the institutional configuration of industrial relations systems and care policy legacies shaping labour regulation in the sector.
This paper examines youth employment and temporary youth employment across the EU-27 countries and the UK, focussing on the role of labour market institutions. Using EU Labour Force Survey data, we analyse trends and drivers of both overall and temporary youth employment and assess how institutional factors influence these outcomes. Our results show that while youth employment rates tend to converge across countries during recoveries, temporary youth employment remains segmented, especially where employment protection is stricter. Higher levels of education and job quality are associated with better youth employment outcomes and reduced exposure to temporary contracts, consistent with established findings in the literature. Overall, the findings highlight the role of institutional arrangements in shaping youth labour market adjustment and suggest that convergence in headline employment outcomes can coexist with persistent segmentation in contract types across Europe.
Working conditions in the care services have long been the subject of controversial debates in Germany (and across Europe). Based on a multi-method approach, this article examines the evolving dynamics of industrial relations in early childhood education and care and long-term care subsectors, highlighting differences in job quality improvements and the role of collective bargaining in Germany within broader welfare trajectories and transnational labour dynamics. While both subsectors have historically had weak industrial relations, the childcare sector has made significant progress, with strong evidence of social partners using bargaining power to enhance job quality. In contrast, long-term care remains more conservative, characterised by policies promoting defamilialisation through marketisation and non-regulated migrant live-in care work with high shares of for-profit and religious non-profit providers contributing to weak interest representation. The comparison highlights Germany as a case caught between social democratic welfare policies and fragmented industrial relations, showing how this duality shapes job quality in both subsectors differently.
Despite its social importance, the care sector, particularly early childhood education and care (ECEC) and long-term care (LTC), faces a persistent ‘care trilemma’: balancing decent working conditions, public expenditure constraints, and broad service coverage. This paper examines strategies to address this trilemma in Hungary and Slovakia, where care provision follows a ‘low-road’ trajectory marked by underinvestment, poor job quality, and workforce shortages. The paper argues that institutional constraints, weak national coordination, and actor fragmentation limit systematic solutions. Instead, in the absence of cohesive national care policies, mitigation strategies emerge primarily at the local level. These initiatives often operate outside established bargaining structures and are driven by a fragmented actor landscape, including the emergence of new actors beyond formal industrial relations. These localised efforts provide important insights into potential pathways for reform. By highlighting the role of local actor interactions, the paper’s contribution lies in demonstrating how solutions may emerge in contexts where coordinated policies and bargaining failed to improve wages and working conditions in care.
The twin transition—automation/digitalization and the shift to electromobility—poses major challenges for the European automotive supplier industry. This article examines how these transformations reshape plant roles and labor-use strategies in Germany and Central and Eastern/South Eastern Europe (CEE/SEE), regions historically linked through an integrated division of labor. The paper addresses three questions: (1) How have lead plant functions evolved between 2016 and 2024? (2) What differences do we observe between German and CEE/SEE automotive supplier plants with regard to the twin transition? (3) What differences do we observe between Germany and CEE/SEE with regard to labor-use strategies? The analysis draws on two surveys of employee representatives in supplier plants (Germany and five CEE/SEE countries) conducted in 2016 and 2024. Findings indicate slight erosion of German lead plant roles without corresponding upgrade in CEE/SEE; limited but stronger efforts in Germany toward electromobility; and persistent national differences in automation and labor-use strategies, with Germany maintaining high-skill approaches and CEE/SEE relying primarily on semi- and low-skilled labor.
The twin transition in the automotive industry is driving profound changes for its suppliers. Their future viability and employment prospects are increasingly dependent on them actively reshaping their business models. Despite undergoing radical transformation processes, many automotive suppliers still lack future strategies. Where such reorientation initiatives do exist, they often overlook employment-related concerns. Consequently, trade unions and works councils are increasingly recognising the need to engage in business model development to safeguard jobs. However, co-determination actors have no formal decision-making power in this domain within the context of European industrial relations. This paper therefore explores the following questions: How does active participation by co-determination actors in business model development unfold and what role can they play? What challenges do co-determination actors face in the process, and what skills are they developing? Drawing on a cross-comparative analysis of three qualitative case studies in the German automotive supplier industry, the paper shows that active participation by co-determination actors is not only possible but can also be of considerable strategic relevance under certain conditions. The study's examination of the challenges faced and the skills developed provides valuable insights for ongoing EU-level discussions on a "Just Transition" directive.
Women's participation in construction, wood and forestry has historically been low, and it remains a highly gender segregated industry. There has, nevertheless, been a slight upward trend in women's participation in the labour market and an increase in women's participatory structures within national and EU sectoral union organisations. The article assesses barriers and opportunities to the integration of women and aims to identify what unions might do to address these. Drawing on a survey of its members by the European Federation of Building and Woodworkers (EFBWW) on sector-specific solutions and obstacles to increasing women participation and addressing gender inequalities in the industry, the analysis reveals that measures are largely confined to top-down rule-based implementation. This includes relevant provisions in national legislation, aligning with European Union (EU) law and priorities, and improved upon by collective bargaining agreements, such as work-life balance and prevention of harassment at work. The article concludes that greater integration of women's networks and participatory bodies into union activities and structures opens up opportunities for women to be more effectively included in social dialogue processes and for improving the accountability of union organisations. By establishing links with women working in the industry, this would facilitate a bottom-up approach.
Scholarship on power resources theory has often understood 'institutional resources' as restricted to labour market institutions, despite the concept of 'institutions' extending beyond the regulation of the labour market and into goods and services markets. During the pandemic, trade unions assumed such an important, extended role of co-managing functions beyond the labour market. However, under which conditions can unions effectively assume this extended role? We argue that an important condition is the existence of 'political power resources': political characteristics of a given field that empower unions to assume an extended role. We develop this new form of institutional power resource by examining the success of union-led, anti-privatization campaigns in German and English healthcare. In doing so, we explain why campaigns in England succeeded more than in Germany by virtue of the politics of the two countries' healthcare systems: in England, the system's high level of politicization prompted policymakers to follow anti-privatization campaigns and halt privatization; by contrast, in Germany, policymakers could legally circumvent anti-privatization campaigns.
This study examines how Brexit reshaped the institutional foundations of European Works Councils (EWCs). Using historical institutionalism, the analysis conceptualises Brexit as a critical juncture that revealed and accelerated existing institutional dynamics. Drawing on 64 company cases, including 16 in-depth studies, it identifies five developmental outcomes - stability, limitation, exclusion, extinction and innovation/expansion. Most EWCs maintained stability through negotiated adaptation, while others experienced limitations, exclusion or innovation. Outcomes were mainly influenced by management strategies and orientations, national employment relations systems and transnational employee coordination. The findings show how macro-level institutional disruptions translate into negotiated meso-level institutional recomposition.
This study examines global unionization dynamics by analyzing how macro-level contexts and individual characteristics interact. Employing multilevel models on data from 75 countries, we demonstrate that democracy's effect on union membership operates primarily through its interactions with individual characteristics: democracy strengthens the effect of left-wing orientations on unionization while attenuating class-based disparities, enabling workers in precarious positions to narrow the membership gap with more advantaged workers. Economic integration, by contrast, depresses unionization mostly among lower-class workers-widening class-based inequalities-while narrowing ideological gaps by pushing membership down across the political spectrum. These results indicate that macro- and micro-level factors do not operate independently; rather, political and economic contexts condition how class position and ideology shape workers' decisions to unionize. The findings refine "conflict follows capital" argument by showing that while capital mobility repositions potential sites of conflict, it is political openings that structure whether this conflict crystallizes into unionization, and for whom.
This article examines why some trade unions are able to spread innovations aimed at revitalisation across their organisation, while similar initiatives elsewhere remain isolated. Drawing on innovation diffusion and union sociology literatures, it explores the conditions and mechanisms that enable organisation-wide adaptation of these innovations. The study analyses 12 cases from 10 union organisations in eight European countries, using a framework distinguishing between background, remote and proximate conditions. Configurational analysis identifies distinct pathways underpinning successful diffusion across varying institutional and organisational contexts. These pathways work through four generative mechanisms emerging via structure-agency dynamics: internal resource mobilisation; resource compensation; legitimacy assessment; and organisational learning. Based on case study insights providing contextual understanding, the mechanisms demonstrate how unions activate power resources through their agential capabilities to translate innovation-driven revitalisation into sustained organisational change.
This article examines the establishment of the European Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee (ESSDC) for Social Services and its potential to address the job quality dimension of Europe's care trilemma - balancing service coverage, fiscal constraints and working conditions. Drawing on qualitative research, including 133 interviews across 11 countries and document analysis, we explore how this supranational forum can influence national employment practices in a sector marked by varied provision models and weak industrial relations. While ESSDCs have been criticised for limited 'bite' in shaping national policies, we argue that their coordination capacity offers meaningful leverage, particularly in countries with underdeveloped social dialogue. Our findings highlight both structural constraints and promising dynamics of knowledge-sharing. We conclude that although binding outcomes remain unlikely, the ESSDC fosters a community of practice that reframes care work as an investment, not a cost, enabling incremental improvements in job quality and professionalisation.
This article analyses the problematic aspects of the pathways used to recruit mobile migrant labour. The author reflects on characteristics of intra-EU mobility and of third-country nationals' recruitment and discusses similarities and differences between the two types of recruitment. Drawing on recent research evidence from several EU countries, it focuses on issues such as recruitment costs and depth bondage to address the question of how free the choice to migrate is. Transnational recruitment of labour emerges as demand-driven and externalised to a booming industry of private agencies. Labour migration outcomes are shaped by hiring practices by this recruitment industry. There is evidence of the use of go-betweens undermining compliance with, and enforcement of, labour standards. The article draws policy recommendations for the re-regulation of migrant labour recruitment, by making the most powerful actors on the labour demand side, that is, the user undertakings in destination countries, accountable.
This article argues that ER systems in the care sub-sectors in both countries offer social partners opportunities to influence job quality and that the trade unions' efforts have played important roles in limiting wage dispersion and in recent wage increases. Marketization is a challenge to job quality, especially in the Netherlands, but even in the most marketized sub-sector, the Dutch ECEC, ER actors and institutions have limited the deterioration of job quality. Nevertheless, wages are still relatively low for some groups, and the social partners have not been able to prevent job quality problems such as work intensification. This mirrors that factors other than ER and marketization in and beyond the trilemma, including budget constrain and labour shortage, also influence job quality and constrain the actions of social partners.
Working hours and locations are becoming increasingly flexible for many employees. Still, employees' opportunities to flexibly organise their working hours and location largely depend on their occupational position. Despite these notions, only a few systematic empirical studies have been conducted on the distribution of flexible working hours for different groups of workers. In order to carry out an in-depth analysis across occupations, this article distinguishes between employee-centred and employer-centred forms of flexible working hours. It examines which groups of employees benefit more from flexible working hours and which are predominantly burdened by the flexibility demands of their employers. The analysis is based on the EU Labour Force Survey 2019 ad hoc module on working hours and working arrangements and was conducted for five countries representing different working time regimes. The results show that higher-skilled workers can organise their working hours much more flexibly than lower-skilled workers. Employer-centred flexibility is also generally more common among higher-skilled employees. Employees in social services with medium or low qualifications are particularly affected by employer-centred flexibility while having little to no flexibility of their own.
The coordination of decentralized pay bargaining remains a subject of theoretical and empirical debate in European industrial relations. This paper identifies and examines a distinctive model emerging in Ireland – ‘flexible coordination’ – which sustains durable positive outcomes without synchronized wage campaigns, recurring pay rounds, formal bilateral accords between unions and employer associations, or the intervention of proactive mediation bodies. Drawing on extensive quantitative data, documentary data, and multi-level interviews, the paper illustrates how Ireland’s union-led model operates through a combination of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ decentralized coordination mechanisms, anchored in workplace institutions, and adaptive union strategies. Situated within a comparative European framework, the analysis challenges prevailing assumptions about institutional, agency-based, and competitive preconditions widely regarded as necessary for effective decentralized coordination in Europe.
This article offers a critical reflection of the challenges of conducting bibliometric analysis in cross-national comparative industrial relations research on workplace equalities. Drawing on a scoping exercise designed to map equality research in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, we demonstrate how bibliometric methods struggle to capture situated knowledge and translate contested concepts across national contexts. While bibliometric approaches can offer useful insights when carefully deployed, uncritical applications risk producing 'thin' and decontextualised findings. We engage with debates on English Language Predominance, conceptual equivalence, and epistemological diversity, and argue for more reflexive, pluralistic, and 'slow' comparative research, sensitive to the socially constructed and locally situated language on equality at work.
