The Role of Collective Bargaining in Labour Law Regimes: A Global Approach

Abstract

Collective bargaining is a profound channel of collective participation and industrial democracy. The idea of labour protection as a collective phenomenon has been legitimizing the autonomy of collective bargaining and social partners in their relation to the state, which has shaped the strong status of collective agreements in many labour law systems. From the collective labour rights standpoint, recent adjustments to bargaining frameworks that have occurred in many systems under scrutiny place great importance on economic factors and have strikingly narrowed the space of labour rights-oriented argumentation and values.

The collective bargaining regimes in Europe and Asia as well as North and South America under scrutiny face challenges posed by globalization and transformations of work and working life. Responses to ongoing changes reflect the diversity of bargaining regimes but they also highlight the need for a contextual understanding of developments. Although in some countries well-functioning social dialogue involves developing new strategies to improve labour protection, the transformation of work is so profound that it adds pressure to adopt new and more effective bargaining strategies and agendas. One of the evident consequences of decentralization occurring in many bargaining systems is that the power balance in bargaining tables is changing throughout different bargaining levels. The increase of local bargaining calls for developing institutional settings and procedural safeguards to enable local negotiations based on a more equal footing between the parties.

In the domestic systems under comparison, notable differences exist in the status and protection of the right to collective bargaining. Collective bargaining regimes also differ when assessed from local, sectoral and national or regional and global perspectives. Histories shape regulatory approaches and explain the poor development and inefficiency of some bargaining systems. Complex transformations are noticeable in the changing degree of cooperation in industrial relations. There is a need for renewed theoretical approaches to and interpretations of collective bargaining regimes deriving from labour law-originated  concepts and values. From the labour law perspective the present discussion on the need to develop bargaining regimes has been carried out loosely. Ongoing changes in collective labour law regimes are so fundamental that they should affect the way we do labour law. They can be argued as calling for a more precise identification of core concepts and their relation to values and capabilities of a certain historical and enabling character which is visible in established collective labour protection mechanisms in many labour law regimes. Collective bargaining produces frameworks for negotiated flexibility and adjustments required for ensuring employability as well as business competitiveness and efficiency. As a result, decollectivization of industrial relations is taking place as, at the local level, new patterns and methods of setting terms of employment are evolving in a way which highlights employer discretion and bargaining as an individualized process between employer and employee. Beyond domestic regimes, the evolution of transnational agreements is an important development adding a new layer to industrial relations systems. On a theoretical level, transnational agreements connect with the broader economic, social, political and cultural framework of cross-border industrial relations within multinational companies as national industrial relations from different legal contexts amalgamate in companies’ bargaining activities.