Documents Ilsøe, Anna 23 results

"This special issue looks at the contributions of social dialogue and collective bargaining to creating, maintaining or reducing the risks associated with employment contracts of few hours, such as marginal part-time work, temporary agency work and zero-hour contracts. It additionally considers changes in welfare institutions with regard to the protection of these groups of workers. In this paper, we introduce the arguments on why and how working in marginal part-time jobs involves vulnerability, and on the differential roles collective bargaining and social protection may have on these jobs, depending in particular on which status (employees, workers or self-employed) they are associated to."

"The Danish collective bargaining system is often considered a good example of organized decentralization. It has been characterized as a centralized decentralization suggesting a reproduction of sector-level bargaining relations at company level. A recent survey on company-level bargaining in the Danish industrial sector confirms this hypothesis with regard to the experiences of local managers and shop stewards. However, part of the survey also questions whether the reproduction will continue in the future. Small- and medium-sized enterprises and their employees tend to miss out on the mutual benefits obtained through company-level agreements. Furthermore, shop stewards often find it difficult to gain employee support during negotiations, which jeopardizes their bargaining relations with management."

"This article addresses the contribution of decentralized collective bargaining to the development of different forms of flexicurity for different groups of employees on the Danish labour market. Based on five case studies of company-level bargaining on flexible working hours in Danish industry, it is argued that decentralized bargaining has enabled new balances between flexibility and security to develop for many but not all groups of employees. On the one hand, the company-level agreements on flexible working hours facilitate greater efficiency and employee satisfaction that often goes beyond the text of the agreements. On the other hand, less flexible employees often face difficulties in meeting the demands of the agreements and may ultimately be forced to leave the company and rely on unemployment benefits and active labour market policies. In a flexicurity perspective, this development seems to imply a segmentation of the Danish workforce regarding hard and soft versions of flexicurity. "

"Does regulation of working hours at national and sector level impose straitjackets, or offer safety nets to employees seeking working time flexibility? This article compares legislation and collective agreements in the metal industries of Denmark, Germany and the USA. The industry has historically been trend-setting for collective bargaining in all three countries, but with very different effects on working time. Organized decentralization seems to pave the way for fewer straitjackets, whereas the opposite seems to be the case with regard to disorganized decentralization. "

"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."

"On 17 January 2008, the Lessius University College organized an international conference in the context of the Leo Tindemans Chair. The conference aimed to foster the debate on flexicurity in the European Union from a multi-disciplinary approach. It raised key questions, such as: In what context does flexicurity play a role? What are the current challenges for the world of work? What is the meaning of flexicurity? How is it to be understood in European economic and social policy? What is the success of the ‘Danish model' and is it transferable? What is the effect of the flexicurity debate on labour laws? How will European flexicurity policy develop and what can Member States do to become flexicure? This book contains the papers that were drafted in view of the conference. They are written from different disciplinary angles, such as economics, political sciences, labour market studies, social policy and law. "

"Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of part-time work on absolute wages. The empirical focus is wages and working hours in three selected sectors within private services in the Danish labour market – industrial cleaning, retail, hotels and restaurants – and their agreement-based regulation of working time and wages. Theoretically, this analysis is inspired by the concept of living hours, which addresses the interaction between working hours and living wages, but adds a new layer to the concept in that the authors also consider the importance of working time regulations for securing a living wage.

Design/methodology/approach
The paper builds on desk research of collective agreements and analysis of monthly administrative register data on wages and working hours of Danish employees from the period 2008-2014.

Findings
This analysis shows that the de facto hourly wages have increased since the global financial crisis in all three sectors. This is in accordance with increasing minimum wage levels in the sector-level agreements. The majority of workers in all three sectors work part-time. Marginal part-timers – 15 hours or less per week – make up the largest group of workers. The de facto hourly wage for part-timers, including marginal part-timers, is relatively close to the sector average. However, the yearly job-related income is much lower for part-time than for full-time workers and much lower than the poverty threshold. Whereas the collective agreement in industrial cleaning includes a minimum floor of 15 weekly working hours – this is not the case in retail, hotels and restaurants. This creates a loophole in the latter two sectors that can be exploited by employers to gain wage flexibility through part-time work.

Originality/value
The living wage literature usually focusses on hourly wages (including minimum wages via collective agreements or legislation). This analysis demonstrates that studies of low-wage work must include the number of working hours and working time regulations, as this aspect can have a dramatic influence on absolute wages – even in cases of hourly wages at relatively high levels. Part-time work and especially marginal part-time work can be associated with very low yearly income levels – even in cases like Denmark – if regulations do not include minimum working time floors. The authors suggest that future studies include the perspective of living hours to draw attention to the effect of low number of weekly hours on absolute income levels."

"The discussion on the digitalisation of work has intensified in recent years. The literature points to two main trends accelerated by digitalisation – work automation that eliminates or changes job functions, and the creation of work without jobs via digital platforms. This article addresses the question as to how social partners define digitalisation of work and their perception of its consequences, while also looking at their recent responses to it. Drawing on interviews with unions and employers' organisations in Denmark, Sweden and Germany, it examines social partner initiatives in the unilateral, tripartite and bipartite arenas on various forms of neo-corporatist labour market regulation. The focus is on service work in the private sector, an area of the economy currently under pressure from both automation and the trend towards work without jobs. Whereas the social partners seem to be very active in the unilateral arena in all three countries, responses differ in the tripartite and bipartite arenas. The article concludes by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the responses in the face of current digitalisation trends and existing models of labour market regulation. "