Outsourcing and collective bargaining - EPSU survey 2004-05
Background
The June 2004 EPSU Congress agreed a resolution on collective bargaining which noted that: “All too often modernisation [is]... nothing less than a euphemism for cost cutting, outsourcing and violation of worker’s rights. EPSU supports modernisation that is based on negotiations between employers and unions. One-sided employer or government measures are rejected.”
Corporate restructuring, of which outsourcing is one of most common elements, is one of six key collective bargaining themes that EPSU is committed to develop policy on over the current Congress period.
The importance of this issue was underlined at a seminar on collective bargaining in the utilities organized jointly by EPSU and the European Trade Union College in May 2004. The participants, mainly from EPSU affiliates in the new member states had an open discussion about the problems they faced and the two working groups separately identified outsourcing as the main challenge.
The participants’ experience of outsourcing usually involved the transfer of employees to new companies who were not covered by the same collective agreement and perhaps where there was no existing structure of trade union representation or collective bargaining. With such a common problem the participants agreed that it would important to try to plan some kind of co-ordinated response from EPSU affiliates.
It was agreed that the EPSU secretariat should prepare a discussion on outsourcing for the next meeting of the utilities standing committee and carry out a survey of EPSU affiliates in the utilities to try to find examples of best practice in dealing with outsourcing. This was carried out during 2004 and then during 2005 the discussion on outsourcing was extended to other EPSU sectors and survey responses were received from local and regional government and national administration.
This report is an updated version of the one which was circulated to the standing committees in 2005, including more survey responses and some recent information on more general surveys on the problems arising from outsourcing.
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