A critical contribution to Social Europe assesses the mainstream idea shared by international economic institutions that collective bargaining should take place at the level of individual companies. The author concludes that what matters for good labour market performance is not whether collective bargaining takes place at company level but whether there is coordination. Employment rates are significantly higher when trade unions and employer federations manage to align the bargaining agendas of the different negotiating parties upon common objectives (Belgium, Nordics, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands). Also striking is that predominantly centralised collective bargaining systems, even if only weakly coordinated, also show relatively better employment outcomes compared to fully decentralised bargaining.
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For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers or Sanne van der Gaag, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the Head of communications at the ETUI, Willy De Backer wdebacker@etui.org © ETUI