This edited volume maps different trajectories in national collective bargaining systems in Europe since the Great Recession. Since the start of the crisis in 2008, wage setting and collective bargaining systems in many EU countries have been under tremendous pressure to follow the logic of companies and market imperatives. Fostering decentralization of collective bargaining has been one of the key objectives of the New European Economic Governance.
The book investigates these developments and has several aims: 1) to analyse the ongoing shift from centrally coordinated multi-employer to decentralized collective bargaining in a number of EU Member States where the former has been traditionally stronger (Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Spain); b) tackling the issue of how in a changing environment company level bargaining can play a useful new role in setting working conditions, without paving the way for social dumping and widened inequalities; and c) investigating convergences and divergences in the five countries trajectories.
