Industrial Relations in Europe 2012 - European Commission - Europa

austerity pay deal in 2009. The government and the representatives of 23 public sector trade
unions signed the austerity pay deal for the period 2009–2010 in order to cut public sector
spending by 100–120 million EUR as part of the state’s anti-crisis efforts. Under the
agreement, public sector wage growth in 2009 should have reached 7.1% instead of the
earlier envisaged 9.9%. Most recently, in a compromise quickly agreed by the social partners
in 2011, the Slovenian government froze pensions, public service salaries and social benefits.
This proved to be inadequate and had to be supplemented by further austerity measures in
2012.
Bulgaria (2010)
After intensive debates between the Bulgarian government and social partners, the National
Council for Tripartite Cooperation reached an agreement on a new anti-crisis package aiming
to support employment, households, business and state finances. Measures concerning
employment and households were adopted mainly because of union requests, but employers
also supported them. Such agreement over the proposed measures, including i.e. minimum
wage growth, removal of the unemployment benefit upper limit, adjusting unemployment
benefits and extending the system of food vouchers, enabled a constructive dialogue and a
conclusion of a tripartite agreement.
Source: EIRO
For more details on issues such as the minimum wage, pay and pensions developments in the
CEECs, see box 2.5.
In addition to these attempts at a coordinated response to the crisis at the national level
through social pacts, there is limited evidence on other kinds of a negotiated response at the
sectoral and company levels. For example, in Slovakia, the sector-level social partners in
sectors most affected by the crisis, such as the metalworking sector, found new incentives to
consolidate sectoral bargaining coordination to meet the challenges of the economic crisis. As
a consequence, bargaining procedures, as well as social partner commitment to a negotiated
response to the crisis were not in danger of decentralisation. Sectoral and company-level
bargaining continued following the same formal and informal rules and played a central role
in the attempt to maintain employment during the economic downturn (Czíria 2011: 22). The
most common collectively-agreed measures included wage moderation, work organisation
changes, including less use of temporary/agency workers, redundancy pay, conflict settlement
and prevention and application of flexible working accounts and short-time work. Although
the social partners found it more difficult to conclude agreements during the crisis and
negotiations took longer than before, in the most important subsectors of the metalworking
sector (mechanical engineering, steel and electronics) the social partners managed to agree on
specific anti-crisis provisions and incorporate them into collective agreements for 2008-2009
and 2010-2011 (c.f. Kahancová 2013). For more details of social partner responses to the
crisis and austerity measures in the EU, see chapter 4.
We can also find exceptional negotiated responses to the crisis at company level, for example
in some of the largest employers in the automotive industry in Hungary (Szabó 2013).
According to the Hungarian Labour Code, trade union approval is not required for company
crisis adjustment strategies, such as working time reductions (Neumann and Boda 2011: 92).
Nevertheless, despite the lack of legal obligation to negotiate with unions, several large
automotive companies signed agreements with unions on crisis relief measures. The main
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