Trends in Collective Bargaining, Wage Stagnation and Income Inequality under Austerity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to explore the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and austerity on collective bargaining and wage outcomes internationally. It takes as the starting point for its analysis the argument advanced in Chapter 1 that the current wave of austerity policies stems from a neoliberal economic consensus that has pervaded developed economies and emphasizes free markets, the removal of rigidities to capital and shrinking the state. That is a philosophy that in policy terms is the antithesis of one supportive of trade unions and collective bargaining, which are themselves under this ideology seen as impediments to markets and economic growth (Harvey, 2007). The chapter therefore adopts a perspective that sees the GFC and austerity as providing a convenient point from which to further consolidate neoliberalism's hold on society (McCann, 2013) and simultaneously undermine one of the chief forms of resistance – trade unions and collective bargaining. The first part of the chapter focuses attention on exploring trends in collective bargaining in the EU and North America (US and Canada) in the post-GFC period. In doing so, it identifies a common trajectory in nation-state policies that encompasses a shift towards identifying the GFC as a public debt crisis; the blaming of trade unions and their members (in particular public sector workers) for the crisis; and the introduction of reforms to collective bargaining and union security designed to reinforce deflationary austerity policies. The chapter's second part then examines trends in wage growth and equality since 2008 and discusses the factors influencing them and the extent to which they can be viewed as a product of the neoliberal-informed economic policies and reforms adopted in response to the crisis. Changes to collective bargaining in the EU Institutional context of collective bargaining in the EU under austerity Since 2000 there have been significant social, economic and political policy shifts that have fundamentally challenged the status of collective bargaining in the EU. Policies associated with a neoliberal agenda that view unions and collective bargaining as sources of rigidities in the market have been central to this change as the EU has focused on the neoliberal free market agenda of labour-market flexibility and downward pressure on terms and conditions to sustain economic growth (Waddington, Muller and Vandaele, 2019). This process of change received support from EU enlargement and the move towards economic and monetary union (EMU).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".