Industrial Relations in Europe 2012 - European Commission - Europa

Chapter 3: Public Sector Industrial Relations in Transition
The economic environment of recent years has had a transformatory effect on public sector
industrial relations, with the crisis serving to accelerate and deepen changes that were already in
train. The effects of this include a revival of unilateralism in the public sector, a recentralisation
of wage-setting systems, an acceleration of the introduction of private sector-style HRM
practices, and a general weakening of trade union influence over governments struggling to
adapt to tough economic conditions.
Based on a draft by Lorenzo Bordogna, University of Milan and Roberto Pedersini, University of
Milan
3.1 Introduction
In most EU Member States government responses to the economic and sovereign debt crises, which
had their origins in 2007-2008, have severely hit the public sector. Traditional patterns of
employment relations have been challenged, past trends in employment levels have been reversed,
and public sector wages and pension systems have been cut and reformed in order to curb overall
public sector pay-bill and reduce public debt.
This chapter provides an overview of the structure of the public sector, employment trends and the
basic features of public sector employment relations in the EU-27, highlighting transformations in
collective bargaining and wage setting systems.
The chapter is organised as follows.
Section 2 deals with the size of the public sector. Section 3 is devoted to the analysis of some
structural features of public sector employees, in terms of gender, part time/full time,
temporary/open-ended employment and age. Section 4 analyses the employment status of public
sector employees across the EU countries, with a distinction between those whose employment
relationship is (still) regulated through a special statute, often under public and/or administrative
law, and those with ordinary employment contracts under civil or commercial law, like their private
sector counterparts. The right to collective bargaining of public employees and possibly also the
right to strike is linked to this distinction. Section 5 deals with trade unions and employers, with
sub-sections devoted to trade union density and structure, employers’ representatives, and the
European sectoral social dialogue. The wage setting systems prevailing in EU Member States are
the topic of Section 6, with the main distinction between systems based on unilateral government
determination, systems where collective bargaining is the main method of wage determination, and
hybrid or mixed systems. A topic to which the traditional issue of centralisation/decentralisation of
industrial relations is linked, as well as recent trends towards the differentiation and, possibly
individualisation, of treatment (Section 7). Section 8 deals with the issue of industrial conflict in the
public services and the settlement of disputes. In the final Section, building on previous analyses,
five country clusters are identified, summarising the main features that characterise public sector
industrial relations systems across the EU-27.
3.2 Size of the public sector
For an overview of the issues surrounding the definition of the public sector, see chapter 1. In
particular, box 1.3 explains that data based on a classification of activities can only serve as a proxy
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