Documents Annesley, Claire 2 results

"Recent research on the fate of organised labour in western Europe has emphasised the capacity trade unions have to develop and implement revitalisation strategies as well as the fact that different trade union movements implement different strategies. In the case of Germany, trade unions have tended to defend existing mechanisms of social partnership and restructure the movement through mergers. This article argues that this approach has severe limitations given the diverse transformation of the German political economy. It presents research on the revitalisation strategies of Germany's new service sector trade union Ver.di established in 2001. The article argues that Ver.di has an awareness of the necessity of adopting new and comprehensive strategies for revitalisation, but that it is tending towards traditional strategies. This disadvantages those regions and sectors where institutions of industrial relations are not embedded."

"The Lisbon Process, launched in 2000 and relaunched in 2005, revived the debate about the existence of a European social model. This article argues that the Lisbon agenda presents a coherent vision of a social model which can be characterized as a Europe-wide Adult Worker Model (AWM). This is a system which assumes paid employment for all adults in order to secure their economic independence. The article identifies evidence of a development in this direction in the European Employment Strategy guidelines from 1997 through to the 2005 integrated macro-economic and employment guidelines. It concludes that this reorientation of the European social model is a vision of a supported AWM welfare system more akin to Sweden than the United States. However, the soft governance method used for social policy makes it vulnerable to changing political constellations in member states."