Documents Due, Jesper 9 results

"This article examines social dialogue in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the three Baltic states. It argues that social dialogue in these countries does not measure up to the minimum criteria for effectiveness and has failed to counteract serious reductions in real wages and employment opportunities. It presents ideas on how to improve the social dialogue and suggests how these improvements might be initiated. However, many of the proposals face difficulties because of the weak organizational capacities of the state and especially of the social partners. It is therefore unlikely that these countries will be capable of substantially improving the social dialogue using their own resources; this would require more forceful intervention by the European Union."

"In recent decades Germany and Denmark have constituted survival areas for the classical IR system in an era that has otherwise largely been characterised by the deregulation and disorganisation of industrial relations. From the mid-1990s onwards, however, it has to varying degrees been possible to observe erosive tendencies in these hitherto sturdy fortresses of “organised decentralisation”. It is the main thesis of this article that the dualistic German system makes it more difficult for the German parties to adapt the bargaining system so that their overall coordination can be preserved even though the required decentralisation is introduced. This thesis is investigated through an extensive comparison of the drivers, contexts and outcomes of decentralisation in Danish and German industry over the last 10-15 years. The article concludes that the single-channel representation system and the more homogeneous composition of company sizes in Denmark are core explanations why Denmark exhibits fewer erosive trends than Germany and more signs of renewal in the development towards multi-level regulation."

"The economic crisis weighed heavily on the 2010 collective bargaining rounds in the Danish and Swedish manufacturing sectors — the pattern-setting sectors in both countries. This article analyses and compares the bargaining rounds from agenda-setting to signing, pointing to the significant differences in bargaining structures, processes and output. On the whole, the crisis seems to have had little effect on the Danish bargaining system due to a strong centralization on the employer side through the Confederation of Danish Industries, union moderation and the coordination of bargaining areas by Denmark's mediation institution. Conversely, the bargaining round in Sweden puts a question-mark over the viability of the whole Swedish bargaining system. Union coordination was shattered when the white-collar unions broke ranks and concluded agreements before the LO unions. But more importantly, Teknikföretagen — the biggest employers' federation — quit the Industrial Agreement after the negotiations and, once again, Swedish social partners are being forced to readjust the procedural framework for collective bargaining. "