December 2013: EPSU Collective Bargaining Conference Report

Over 100 trade union representatives from more than 20 countries met in Brussels on 16 and 17 December to discuss a range of pressing collective bargaining issues facing EPSU affiliates across Europe.

The conference was opened by Anders Hammarbäck of the Vision trade union in Sweden and chair of EPSU’s standing committee on local and regional government.

EPSU Deputy General Secretary Jan Willem Goudriaan then welcomed participants and provided a short introduction to the conference with a short review of the year and the challenges that face EPSU and its affiliates as they prepare for Congress in May 2014.

Jan Willem reported on some of the recent positive news of action and campaigning by EPSU affiliates in Romania, Bulgaria and Spain and the continuing challenges requiring mobilisations by public service trade unions in Portugal and Spain.

He also highlighted the pressure being exerted by the European institutions in relation to austerity measures that are leading to deep cuts in public spending as well as the direct attacks on collective bargaining in several countries.

Jan Willem stressed the need for an effective response from EPSU and its affiliates to the policies being advocated and implemented by the European institutions.

Economic governance and collective bargaining

Ronald Janssen – economic advisor at the ETUC provided a comprehensive analysis of the economic governance process and its implications for trade unions and collective bargaining.

Ronald set out the breadth of issues reflected in the system from austerity and fiscal consolidation to “reform” of labour markets and the transfer of transfer of responsibilities from national to European level.
Member states were now confronted with country-specific recommendations, including several calling for changes to collective bargaining arrangements, with the threat that these “recommendations” might be given more weight by being transformed into more binding “contractual arrangements” which were on the agenda for the European Council in December.

A central element of the economic governance regulations were those on excessive macroeconomic imbalances. These could lead to Eurozone countries being sanctioned if they didn’t adopt the course prescribed the Commission to reduce whatever it deemed was an excessive imbalance.

While the ETUC can see the need for a European response to tackle these imbalances, it cannot agree on the way the process has been established and that trade unions don’t have an effective countervailing power to challenge the European institutions in the same way that national trade unions have in relation to national governments and employers.

Rather than really address the real roots of the crisis, the European institutions have rewritten the causes of the crisis and put the spotlight on wages and collective bargaining. By focusing on the development of unit wage costs since 1999, they put forward Germany as a model to follow where there was more or less real wage stagnation over this period, compared to 30-40% in countries like Spain.

Eurofound information on pay and conditions

Camilla Galli da Bino, Research Information Officer at the Eurofound tripartite research organisation explained the Foundation’s recent initiative to make information on collective bargaining and pay and conditions more accessible.

Camilla explained the background to the initiative and the kind of work that Eurofound had been doing for many years on different areas of industrial relations, collective bargaining and pay and conditions across different sectors across Europe. Much of this information had been brought together in a new collective bargaining sector of the website allowing users to find easily, for example, trends in pay developments in the civil service and local government over a period of more than 10 years. Camilla encouraged participants to visit the website and look at the collective bargaining data and the timeline of articles on their countries and to send her their comments for ways to improve the coverage and accuracy of the data and reports.

EPSU Executive Committee member, Dr Ivan Kokolov from the FHS health trade union in Bulgaria welcome participants back after lunch and introduced the three afternoon sessions on pay trends in the public services, public-private sector pay comparisons and working conditions in central public administration.

Pay trends in the public services

Torsten Müller, senior researcher at the ETUI trade union research organisation provided an analysis of recent trends in pay bargaining in the public services.

Torsten began by linking his presentation to Ronald Janssen’s overview of economic governance, noting that in several countries pay cuts and pay freezes in the public sector were part and parcel of the policies being imposed by governments at the behest of the Troika. He then outlined recent evidence from the Commission on pay noting the clear trend to very moderate pay rises or continuing freezes across the economy as a whole.

Comparisons of pay trends in the public sector and the whole economy revealed that in several countries public sector pay was moving in line with the general trend and this challenged the claims by the institutions that there was a problem about public sector pay developments.

Public and private sector pay – the public sector wage “premium”

Richard Pond, EPSU policy staff with responsibility for collective bargaining work, set out some of the ideas coming from the European Commission and European Central Bank about public sector pay and its relationship to private sector pay.

A recent conference organised by DG Economic and Financial Affairs debated a range of academic papers examining different pay levels in the public and private sector across Europe and the extent to which public sector pay developments are lead by, or lead, developments in the private sector.

While there is some caution over the definitions and reliability of data, the conclusions of several papers were that there is a public sector pay “premium” and that it was a legitimate target to reduce this “premium” as part of any austerity measures. There was also the argument that, despite evidence to the contrary, public sector pay was often a major influence on private sector pay and so pay freezes and cuts were an important model to maintain wage moderation across the economy.

The focus of the conference was also on the public sector pay structure with the tendency for it to be more compressed than in the private sector, with higher levels of pay than the private sector at the lower end of the pay scale and lower levels for the higher paid. For DG ECFIN this risks creating labour market inefficiencies by failing to reward appropriately different skill levels.

There was no recognition of the fact that the labour market is not a commodity market like any other although some recognition of the fact that public sector employers were trying to take positive steps to tackle the problem of low pay.

Working conditions in central public administration

Isabella Biletta, research manager at Eurofound presented some of the main findings of the Foundation’s report based on a survey of the sector.

Isabella explained that the survey revealed important differences in the way that central public administration was defined across Europe with different responsibilities and variations in the proportion of workers who were employed in the sector. It was apparent that while major restructuring had been taking place in the context of austerity, central public administrations had been experiencing quite significant reforms for many years.

There were certain characteristics of note with higher levels of trade union density and evidence of the role of the public sector as a good employer in relation to initiatives to deal with pay inequality, for example. However, pay and conditions for many workers had been substantially affected by austerity measures with large-scale job cuts while those workers remaining in the sector face pay cuts and/or freezes at the same time as increased stress and workloads.

EPSU president Anne-Marie Perret opened the second day of the conference and participants were invited to take part in three simultaneous workshops looking at the decentralisation of collective bargaining, pay and conditions in social services and youth employment and training.

WORKSHOP 1: Decentralisation of collective bargaining

Richard Pond of EPSU gave an introduction setting out the current areas of debate with pressure from the European institutions for decentralisation of collective bargaining

Despite research failing to confirm the outcomes of the process, the European institutions continue to put pressure on countries to decentralise their systems of collective bargaining. The concern for trade unions, particular in countries like Greece, Spain and Italy, is that this is a process aimed at increasing downward wage flexibility and reducing the power of trade unions.

There are examples where trade unions, in Sweden, for example, have negotiated forms of decentralisation and report positively on the outcome with local agreements providing improvements on the pay and conditions negotiated at sector level. It was important as part of this process to maintain trust between trade unions and employers.

In Germany, the move to local bargaining has often been in the context of outsourcing or privatisation, particularly in the health sector although ver.di has been able to mobilise around this issue, recruiting members as they build up union strength to negotiate new collective agreements.

Contributions from France, Ukraine, Norway, Italy, Serbia, Spain, Montenegro, Turkey and Croatia revealed the very varied collective bargaining arrangements in place in the public services across Europe. For some it was evident that there was a very challenging collective bargaining environment creating concern about any potential employer initiatives towards decentralisation.

WORKSHOP 2: Pay and conditions in the social services

Kea Tijdens of the AIAS research institute at the University of Amsterdam gave an introduction to the workshop setting out the plans for working with EPSU on the WICARE project on pay and conditions in social services and Anders Lindström of the SSR trade union reported back.

Anders explained that the project was intended to improve knowledge of pay and conditions in social survey and the surveys in each country would be aimed at individual workers. The questions would cover pay and a range of employment and working conditions. It will also ask for information about employers (public, private, non-profit) and union membership.

The project will run until October 2014 and there will be a conference in November to discuss results. It was noted that there was evidence from across Europe of a decentralisation of social services, with considerable challenges in terms of trade union membership. The main task for EPSU affiliates will be to encourage individuals to complete the survey.

WORKSHOP 3: Youth employment and training

Florian Popa of Publisind in Romania provided an introduction to the workshop highlighting the massive scale of youth unemployment and the role of public sector employers in responding to this. Conor McDonald of the CPSU in Ireland reported back to the main conference.

Florian set out clearly the extent of youth unemployment and the spread of precarious employment. He also outlined a number of trade union initiatives to tackle the issue which were often a combination of measures to get employers to take on more young workers as well as trying to increase the number of young workers recruited to the trade unions. There were some good examples of organising young members and using social media to get the message across.

There was also discussion about implementing the youth guarantee and the importance of the involvement of trade unions in the process to ensure that the job and training opportunities on offer provided a path into decent work and not a dead-end of precarious employment.

Responding to the economic governance challenge

Luca Visentini, ETUC Confederal Secretary with responsibility for collective bargaining, explained what the ETUC was aiming to do in its coordination of collective bargaining and in relation to the European Semester

Luca outlined the key points of the recent communication on the social dimension of economic and monetary union which, while very weak, did at least argue for a greater role for social partners in the economic governance process. The communication’s proposals for a social angle to economic governance were unconvincing as they failed to give adequate weight to social indicators and the suggested indicators were also insufficient as they failed to include references to collective bargaining. Luca also mentioned the recent agreement with employer organisations over the role of social partners in the European Semester.

The ETUC was now working on its plans for a new approach to coordination of collective bargaining to ensure that trade unions at both national and European level were able to intervene in a coordinated way at the appropriate stages of the European Semester – particularly in relation to the Annual Growth Survey, the drafting of the National Reform Programmes and then the reactions to the country-specific recommendations. Luca hoped that the practical ideas set out in the ETUC’s collective bargaining toolkit would facilitate this coordination.

Gender pay gap

Lionel Fulton of the Labour Research Department reported on the survey of EPSU affiliates and provided data on the extent of the gender pay gap across Europe.

Lionel began with a clarification of the definition of the gender pay gap means and an indication of the size of the gap for economy as a whole. He highlighted the fact that in some countries the level of women’s employment can affect the figures, effectively understating the extent of pay inequality. The statistics showed variations across the different parts of the public services and although there was evidence from many countries of a closing of the gap, progress in other countries was either slow or non-existent.

Lionel then outlined some of the initiatives EPSU affiliates have taken in relation to some key aspects of gender pay inequality – access to information, labour market structure, part-time work, parental leave and childcare, working time flexibility, transparent pay systems and higher pay increases for lower paid workers and impact of outsourcing.

Conclusions and the 2009 and 2014 Congress resolutions on collective bargaining

Richard Pond closed the conference with an overview of some of the main points of discussion linking them to the work that had been done since the 2009 Congress and to the key issues that were being addressed in the resolution that will go to the next Congress in May 2014.

The headline issues were:
- economic governance – the need to improve coordination at sector and cross-sector levels, nationally and at European level to challenge where possible the current system

- defending collective bargaining rights – supporting affiliates who are trying to regain or maintain their negotiating rights and working with the ETUC and PSI to continue to raise these infringements at European and global level

- continue to argue for real pay increases for public sector workers and for pay developments in line with the private sector while challenging attacks on public sector pay structures from the European institutions

- support initiatives to improve pay levels for lower paid workers whether those are through collective agreements or national minimum wages or “living” wages

- continue to monitor progress on closing the gender pay gap both by updating statistics and reporting on affiliates initiatives in collective bargaining and legal cases

- review the development of collective bargaining policies on issues like equal pay, precarious employment and training and jobs for young workers and investigate how these can be promoted through coordinated action by affiliates

- take a strategic look at working time to see how to get shorter working hours back on the bargaining agenda and plan ahead in expectation of a further attempt by the Commission to revise the Working Time Directive.


This conference received financial support from the European Commission