Documents Naczyk, Marek 7 results

"This paper analyses business preferences towards the development of private pension funds. Existing studies about business involvement in welfare state reform equate capital with employers and focus on the socio-economic determinants of their preferences. In contrast, this paper also analyses the role of financial firms. Moreover, it develops a set of hypotheses about how institutions contribute to shape capital's preferences towards pension privatization. In particular, I study the impact of institutional feedback from the public/statutory pay-as-you-go system, from existing private/supplementary occupational pensions and the influence of social partnership. Financial firms are hypothesized to be a key proponent of pension privatization, while employers may have a much more ambivalent attitude. The argument is tested using a comparative historical analysis of pension debates in Belgium and France from the end of the 1970s until the mid-2000s."

"Occupational welfare (OW) has a long tradition in the United Kingdom. It has been relatively well developed because the British welfare state offers comparatively meagre cash benefits for the risk of income loss due to sickness, maternity, unemployment and, most of all, old age. This paper investigates OW in two areas, namely old-age pensions and unemployment protection. In the case of unemployment protection, it focuses more specifically on contractual redundancy pay and shorttime working arrangements. The paper sheds light on these arrangements' historical evolution, their current institutional traits (in terms of regulation, governance and funding) and on their coverage. Data have been collected from existing research on the topic, official documents produced by trade unions and employers' associations, statistical and administrative data, and an ad hoc survey of occupational arrangements in four service and four manufacturing companies."

"The French pension system has for long been characterised by its very low reliance on funded pensions, which have almost become a taboo subject since the Second World War. While other countries have often complemented statutory pensions with funded occupational pension schemes, in France, the social partners have put in place an encompassing network of supplementary pension arrangements financed on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis. The generosity of these schemes and their defence by trade unions and part of the business community has considerably limited the room for expansion of funded pension schemes. However, the role played by these supplementary PAYG schemes has significantly changed over the last two decades. First, the gradual harmonization of rules within the different schemes and their compliance with EU social security regulations are leading to their quasi “first-pillarization”. Second, similar to statutory pensions, these schemes have also undergone gradual retrenchment and will offer reduced replacement rates. As a result, the development of pension savings has been implicitly promoted, although more on a voluntary basis than on a compulsory one. Despite a unification in the regulatory framework governing funded – occupational and personal – pension plans, access to these schemes remains mostly limited to high-skilled workers."

"European governments are increasingly retreating from public pension provision and promoting the expansion of private pension funds. Analysts of comparative social policy have traditionally considered that the politics of pension privatisation is driven by politicians' and socioeconomic actors' concerns about the generosity and costs of pension arrangements. But, when they are fully funded instead of being financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, pensions generate funds that are injected into the financial system. The existence of such a welfare–finance nexus means that stakeholders in the pension system are also attentive to how pension funds invest their assets, and may try to actively shape the institutional design of pensions in accordance with such financial concerns. This article focuses on the role of organised labour and business, that is, employers and the financial industry, in pension privatisation and develops theoretical expectations on how these actors' interest in maximising control over private pension funds' financial assets affects pension politics. The argument is tested with a case study of French pension privatisation between the 1980s and the 2000s."

" This article considers whether organized labour's engagement with shareholder activism represents a shift in unions' traditional stakeholder preferences on corporate governance under pension fund capitalism. It does so in light of recent critiques of the class power thesis of corporate governance which suggest greater fluidity and fragmentation in labour's approach. Adopting a diverse case study strategy to compare organized labour's actions in the United States, United Kingdom and France, the article explains these activities as innovative strategies, similar to other revitalization initiatives, designed to advance traditional agendas by alternative means. The article thus concludes that, while organized labour's shareholder activism is unexpected under the class power thesis, its core preferences remain largely unchanged."

"An advocacy coalition of trade unions, churches and NGOs had been trying for a long time to mobilise domestic media and politicians in order to re-regulate the German meat industry. The meat industry's low-cost business model, using employee posting and subcontracting on a massive scale, has led to extreme forms of unsafe working and poor living conditions for large numbers of Central and Eastern European workers. But it is only in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that the German government decided to ban subcontracting, posting and temporary work in this industry. Why did COVID-19 make a difference? In an industry in which the livelihoods of local communities in Germany's pig belt and in deprived rural parts of Romania have become structurally dependent on subcontracting, institutional change would not have happened without the pre-existing mobilisation of the above-mentioned advocacy coalition. But COVID-19 created a ‘perfect storm' that empowered this coalition by helping reframe the meat industry issue away from a ‘narrow' employment regulation problem into a ‘broader' public health threat. Indeed, after becoming a virus hotspot, the meat industry was no longer just a threat to the livelihoods of its own workers, but to those of the wider local community. "