Class Struggle from Above

At the time of the global financial crisis all four of our national cases had experienced several decades of neoliberalism, together with the embrace of the global economy and the need to adapt to the new context it wrought. The degree of transition and its pace varied but a general trajectory was common. Each of the countries retained their own institutional profile of labour relations and labour market policies, the product of distinct historical and sociological development. Even the highly integrated EU consigns jurisdiction in these areas to the national level meaning that adjustments to preferred international options are subject to delay and take specific forms at the national and subnational levels. The starting points in terms of the 2008 financial crisis and its longer-term impacts were different, as were the experiences of the crisis itself. Yet each faced in its own way the structural, political, and ideological pressures emanating from the international political economy and its governance structures. Here we highlight a number of features that relate to labour relations and labour markets in particular. That done, we present snapshots of these countries’ labour profiles at the onset of the crisis, and subsequent comparative developments since the turn to austerity in 2010, paying due attention to the factors involved in the institutionalization, insulation and insinuation schema outlined in Chapter 1. Underlying national responses to the crisis and longer-run institutional patterns held different configurations of class relations. Often cited indicators of working-class power include trade union density and collective bargaining coverage, strike activity and the existence, or not, of a dependable political ally – usually in the modern period, a social democratic party notionally more pro-labour than other parties. Union density in 2007 varied with Ireland and Canada around 30 per cent, Denmark much higher at 68 per cent, and Spain lagging at 16 per cent. In all cases they were lower than they had been a decade earlier – losing a per cent or two in the case of Canada and Spain, but experiencing more dramatic falls in the case of Denmark (from 75 per cent in 1997) and Ireland (from 44 per cent). Collective bargaining coverage varied according to the industrial relations system, closely tracking union density in Canada, but deviating in the other countries.

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