Variable Pay and Collective Bargaining: A Cross-National Comparison of the Banking Sector

Abstract

This article analyses the challenge of variable pay to collective bargaining, based on a cross-national comparison that takes banking organizations in Austria, Norway, Spain and the UK as representatives of Europe's principal bargaining systems. The hypothesis is that the capacity of collective bargaining to govern variable pay varies with the bargaining system. As the findings show, articulated multi-employer bargaining is more able to govern variable pay than its unarticulated counterpart and single-employer bargaining. Within the case of articulated multi-employer bargaining, single-channel systems of employee workplace representation are superior to dual systems, all the more since the former equip the unions with selective incentives for membership.