Documents: Social Dialogue
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Philippe Pochet
If the debates raged around the European Employment Strategy (EES) and more generally on Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and the new modes of governance, less and less attention was paid to social dialogue. An evaluation of the cross-industry and sectoral social dialogue is a difficult task as it is an on-going process with various dimensions. Social dialogue is based on the treaty (Art. 138 and 139) and is generally considered as being part of a hard law approach. Nevertheless, the last cross-industry agreement dated back to 1999 and only few binding agreements have been signed at sectoral level. Since 2000, the agreements signed were autonomous agreements which look like a hybrid between soft and hard law both by flexibility of the content and the nature of instruments to implement the EU agreement.
To improve the knowledge of all these elements, the Observatoire social européen has created a database including all the joint documents signed by the social partners at European level covering the 31 official sectoral committees and the interprofessional social dialogue (since 1978). From this quantitative analysis we can detect certain overall trends on the emergence and evolution of the sectoral social dialogue and compare its dynamics with those of the interprofessionnal dialogue.
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Philippe Pochet
Traditionally, the European social dialogue has been studied by experts in its interprofessional dimension. Yet, the sectoral social dialogue has attracted less attention until now. That limit of the contemporary literature seems even more evident if we compare last trends in both fields. Interprofessional dialogue has developed in three phases a) the emergence from Single Act to Maastricht b) the consolidation from Maastricht to 2000 c) the uncertain time from the autonomous joint programme to today. Recently it has entered into a crisis as the last legally binding agreement was signed in 1999. In the new century, the interprofessionnal social partners have only signed soft law agreements (e.g. telework, stress, long life learning). As to the sectoral dialogue, then, recent studies stressed that the type of documents adopted has underwent a qualitative change. In other words, it appeared that significant developments were underway both at interprofessional and sectoral level which needed to be better understood, analysed and assessed.
To improve the knowledge of all these elements, the Observatoire social européen has created a database including all the joint documents signed by the social partners at European level covering the 31 official sectoral committees and the interprofessional social dialogue. From this quantitative analysis we can detect certain overall trends on the emergence and evolution of the sectoral social dialogue and compare its dynamics with those of the interprofessionnal dialogue.
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Philippe Pochet
An evaluation of the cross-industry and sectoral social dialogue is a difficult task as it is an on-going process with various dimensions, among them the information, consultation, and negotiation between the European trade unions, the European employers and the Commission are often underlined. Because of the lack of space, we will analyse here the main outcome of the social dialogue: the agreed joint texts. We will analyse the social dialogue dynamic as a process per se and not benchmark it with industrial relations at national level. By doing so, we can underline the originality of these processes. We will present in an integrated framework both the cross-industry and sectoral social dialogues. Their stories run mostly in parallel but recently the interaction has increased as they have worked on the same topics (telework for example) and as the Commission is trying to combine them. Finally, they have more or less reached the same point (soft law as the main regulatory instrument) and are confronted by the same set of problems (implementation, enlargement, representativeness). As the sectoral social dialogue is much less well-known that the cross-industry one, we will concentrate our attention on developments at sectoral level
This chapter is structured as follows: the first part presents a brief history of the European social dialogue, the second part defines broad categories to classify the joint texts adopted by the EU social partners, the third present a quantitative analysis of the texts adopted in the last ten years at sectoral level. Section 4 briefly illustrates the nature of the exchange and presents a typology. Then we draw some conclusions.
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Philippe Pochet
In this paper we will draw together two objectives of the NEWGOV project. On the one hand to map all the existing documents in the field and on the other to reflect on the emergence and the evolution of new modes of governance in specific domains. We have created a database including all the joint documents signed by the social partners at European level. We present the results of a quantitative analysis covering all 353 agreements adopted since 1978 at sectoral level and 52 at interprofessional level. From this quantitative analysis we can detect certain overall trends on the emergence of and evolution affecting the sectoral social dialogue and compare the dynamics with the interprofessionnal social dialogue. This article is structured in four main parts. First we classify the texts adopted into six categories: ‘agreements’, ‘recommendations’, ‘declarations’, ‘internal rules’, ‘tools’ and ‘common positions’. Then, we briefly set out the main stages leading up to the formation of the 31 sectoral committees now in existence and the developments at interprofessionnal level. The two main parts are part 3 and part 4 which present the findings from our data. The third describes the developments in the sectoral social dialogue, analysing the different dimensions (number of documents, type, topics, and to whom they are addressed). The fourth part follows the same lines but at the interprofessionnal level. Then we draw some conclusions.
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Philippe Pochet
The paper presents, in an integrated framework, both the cross-industry and sectoral social dialogues. The first part presents a brief history of the European social dialogue, the second part defines broad categories to classify the joint texts adopted by the EU social partners, the third present a quantitative analysis of the texts adopted in the last ten years at sectoral level. Section 4 briefly illustrates the nature of the exchange and presents a typology. It then draws some conclusions. The paper was presented at the EUSA Tenth Biennial International Conference, Montreal, Canada May 17-19, 2007, in the session on “EU soft law: emergence, operation, and influence in comparative perspective”.
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