Transmission Belts of Transnational Competition? Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining in the Context of European Integration

Abstract

Collective bargaining has in the past set a floor to competitive undercutting of wages and employment conditions, acting as a source of `industrial citizenship'. European economic integration threatens to initiate a neo-liberal regime and to undermine national structures of collective regulation. Trade unions seem compelled to acquiesce in the policies of individual companies striving to survive in the face of intensified market forces. The authors suggest that unions can escape their current dilemmas only through developing new forms of political intervention aiming at the creation of effective European procedures of employment regulation.