European Constitutionalism and Industrial Relations

Abstract

European industrial relations have undergone fundamental changes from the early 1980s onwards. This is mainly due to a range of structural shifts in the mode of economic, social and political reproduction. Most important among them are the following: the reorganisation of work and production (involving new technologies, rationalisation and labour shedding, flexible working conditions, changes in the production chain, or new logistic concepts); sluggish economic growth, high rates of unemployment and a highly fragmented workforce; an expanding service sector; and an accelerated transnationalisation of trade, production and finance. Two other significant factors are the increasing influence of banks, investment funds and insurance companies, and a transformation of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ into a ‘Schumpeterian workfare regime’, which implies restricted opportunities for social and economic intervention. Most scholars agree that the re-launching of European integration since the mid-1980s should be seen as an integral part of all these tendencies of socio-economic restructuring (Ferner and Hyman, 1998; Martin and Ross, 1999). Without doubt, its core economic projects — the European Monetary System (EMS), the Internal Market, and Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) — have had a serious impact on the transformation of industrial relations.KeywordsEuropean UnionTrade UnionIndustrial RelationSocial RegulationEuropean Monetary SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.