Aristea Koukiadaki

The Establishment and Operation of Information and Consultation of Employees Arrangements in a Capability-Based Framework

Drawing on an evaluative framework inspired by the capability approach, the article assesses the nature and implications of company responses to the British legislation transposing Directive 2002/14/EC on information and consultation rights of employees. Evidence from five case studies in the business services and the financial sectors suggests that the introduction of the Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004 drove the spread of voluntary arrangements. However, the legislation has not promoted so far an effective framework for the development of deliberative procedures between management and labour with the aim of advancing a ‘capability for voice’. This is attributed to its institutional design and the limited degree to which extra-legal ‘conversion factors’ are available in the British industrial relations system.

The Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Evolution of Labour Law in Europe

The sovereign debt crisis, which began in Greece in 2010 and then spread to several other Eurozone economies, is having profound consequences for the labour law systems of the debt-affected Member States and for the role of social policy in EU law and governance. As a result of the austerity measures stipulated in the loan agreements made between the ‘Troika’ of the IMF, ECB and Commission, and the Member States receiving financial assistance, essential features of national systems of labour law and social security have been, or are in the course of being, radically revised. These ‘structural’ reforms are leading to a worsening of living and working conditions and a deepening of economic recession. Under these circumstances, current efforts to amend the framework of EU law and governance in such a way as to embed fiscal discipline in the Eurozone, epitomised by the ‘Six Pack’ of economic regulations and the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, risk inducing a continent-wide ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards. In this chapter we seek to put the sovereign debt crisis in the context of the long-run evolution of labour law systems in Europe as well as more recent institutional developments at EU level. We argue that notwithstanding the absence of an EU-level labour code that would have put a floor under national labour law systems, the experience of European labour law from the early 1970s onwards has been one of stability (with the UK being the most prone to change), and the maintenance of a significantly higher level of protection than in the US. Even with the gradual implementation of the programme of the economic and monetary union from the Treaty of Maastricht onwards, and the deepening of internal market reforms, labour law at Member State level did not undergo a fundamental change (section 2). We argue that part of the reason for this was a fundamental compatibility of labour law protection with the

Continuity and Change in Joint Regulation in Europe: Structural Reforms and Collective Bargaining in Manufacturing

This article introduces seven national studies which examine the impact of austerity measures on collective bargaining in manufacturing in the European Union (EU) countries most affected by the crisis. We explore the changing dynamics in the relationships between domestic actors in the period leading up to the crisis and the influence of supranational actors thereafter. Austerity measures have undermined the structure, process, content and outcomes of collective bargaining, though the nature and degree of changes are conditioned by path-dependent factors of each national system.

Reflexive Law and the Reformulation of EC-level Employee Consultation Norms in the British Systems of Labour Law and Industrial Relations

The 2002/14/EC Directive establishing a general framework for informing and consulting employees in the European Community allowed considerable flexibility in transposition and implementation. Viewing – in line with reflexive law theory – the Directive as a key tool in allowing EC law to become embedded in the national legal and industrial relations systems, the paper assesses its transposition and impact in Britain. The very flexibility of the Directive made it possible for the British social systems to respond in an innovative way to the changing forms of employee representation. But the relative weakness of the regulatory design of the transposing legislation with regard to the nature of the legal obligations, the enforcement mechanism and the degree to which legal resources could be utilised by trade unions constrained the re-configuration of labour law and its coupling to employee representation arrangements traditionally associated with the British industrial relations system.

Deconstructing the Greek system of industrial relations

Under external pressure, the Greek system of industrial relations has undergone radical regulatory changes since 2010. These have led to a significant contraction of higher level bargaining and a process of disorganized decentralization, bringing the collective bargaining system to a brink of collapse. Emerging demands on the part of both employers and unions to preserve multi-level bargaining, together with greater support on the part of the state, could halt or even reverse some of these trends. But the scope for success of such efforts depends on how far ‘regulated austerity’ continues to dominate European policy.