Puzzling choices in hard times: Union ideologies of social concertation in the Great Recession

Arianna Tassinari,Manuela Galetto,Jimmy Donaghey

doi:10.1111/irel.12299

Abstract

AbstractUsing the cases of Ireland and Portugal during the post‐2008 Great Recession, we argue that unions' ideological formations around social concertation are central in aiding them to navigate their options about whether to engage in concessionary bargaining with government under crisis conditions. Building on Hyman's triangle of union identity, we show how an ideational perspective can complement interest‐based accounts of unions' strategies to explain their engagement with policymakers or their opposition in the macro‐management of the economy.

Highlights

Social partnership or social concertation—that is, bipartite or tripartite arrangements where governments formally engage with organized labor and capital in the formation of public policy—has been an important feature of industrial relations in Europe since the age of Fordist capitalism
Drawing on Hyman's (2001) triangle of union identity, we put forward the concept of “ideologies of social concertation” to operationalize the sets of deep-seated ideas that unions hold about their role in the political sphere and in the national economy. We show how these long-standing ideological formations interact with more contingent ideas about the specificities of the crisis conjuncture in shaping the process of definition of unions' interests in hard times, informing unions' decisions to either maintain their commitment to social concertation, even when this entails extremely limited gains, or to remain committed to conflictual strategies against social concertation, even when these bear scarce or adverse results
Despite Portugal's extensive economic problems in the run up to the Great Recession, Portuguese policymakers continued to appreciate the capacity of social concertation to secure political and social stability and attempted to use it as a strategy of crisis management on repeated occasions (Tassinari, 2021)

Summary

Introduction

Social partnership or social concertation—that is, bipartite or tripartite arrangements where governments formally engage with organized labor and capital in the formation of public policy—has been an important feature of industrial relations in Europe since the age of Fordist capitalism. We show how these long-standing ideological formations interact with more contingent ideas about the specificities of the crisis conjuncture in shaping the process of definition of unions' interests in hard times, informing unions' decisions to either maintain their commitment to social concertation, even when this entails extremely limited gains, or to remain committed to conflictual strategies against social concertation, even when these bear scarce or adverse results.

Results

Conclusion