Industrial Relations in Europe 2012 - European Commission - Europa

government over the entire bargaining machinery, and new amendments in 2009 (the so-called
Brunetta reform) to reduce the scope and autonomy of local-level negotiations and partially recentralise
the bargaining structure at national level, with the legal obligation to move from the
previous 12 sectoral bargaining units at national level to no more than four.
In Spain also, a trend towards decentralisation took place in the 1990s and 2000s, in connection
with the process of greater administrative autonomy given to regions and local governments, in turn
giving rise to relatively complicated and at times overlapping regulations. To partly contrast these
trends, in 2006 a reform of legislation on employee representation and determination of
employment conditions in the public administration (LORAP, Ley de Órganos de Representaciόn,
Determinaciόn de las Condiciones de Trabajo y Partecipaciόn del Personal al Servicio de las
Administraciones Públicas, approved in 1987 and amended in 1990 and 1994) was adopted to
coordinate the regulation of some common issues for salaried employees and civil servants across
the various administration levels (state, autonomous communities and local entities; EIRO 2011).
A process of decentralisation of the determination of employment conditions and, where it was
permitted, of collective bargaining, took place also in many Eastern European countries after the
end of communist regimes, at times in a rather disorganised way. In some countries, collective
bargaining, for the groups of employees for which this is permitted, takes place only at company or
individual employer level. This is due either to the weakness of trade unions (Estonia, Latvia) or the
lack of employers’ association at sectoral level (Czech Republic), or both reasons. In Romania, the
wages of public employees were until recently determined by a large number of rules, with
significant variations between different parts of the system, giving rise to more than 400 wage
levels with a 1:29 ratio between the minimum and maximum wage. This complicated and dispersed
system was reformed by a 2009 framework law, amended in 2010, to harmonise the wage system of
public sector workers, within a comprehensive design to restructure public sector employment and
pay. This new legislation, initially agreed upon by trade unions, was eventually unilaterally
imposed by the government (Vasile 2012: 274-76).
The clearest example of uncoordinated, decentralised single-level bargaining structure is probably
that of the UK central government during the period of Conservative cabinets between 1979 and
1996. Here, the highly centralised civil service system and civil-service-wide pay determination
were replaced with around 90 semi-autonomous executive agencies, each with its own wage and
grading system, and forms of performance-related pay. However, this break-up of previously
unified conditions of employment in locally-based systems, aimed at increasing flexibility, had
unintended consequences in terms of fragmented career pathways, staff transfer problems, and
rigidities. Under subsequent governments, forms of devolution of pay determination have been
maintained to support modernisation, albeit embedded within coherent national frameworks, in an
attempt to reduce pay dispersion (Bach and Givan 2011). Considering, moreover, that bargaining
decentralisation has always been weaker in other parts of the public sector, and the increased role of
the pay review bodies, it is probably inappropriate to identify the present public sector wage setting
system in the UK as a case of uncoordinated decentralisation. In any case, within this framework,
the recent economic crisis has favoured, as in other countries, forms of recentralisation and
unilateralism.
France and Germany are traditionally credited with the most centralised wage setting systems
among all the EU-27 Member States (Bordogna and Winchester 2001). This is still the case in
France, whereas recent developments in Germany require qualifications.
In France negotiations on wage increases, when they take place, are held between the representative
trade unions and the Minister of Public Function, within limits set by the Minister of Finance. One
bargaining unit covers all the employees of the three public functions (central government,
including education; local government; and hospitals). When a decision is taken by the government
to increase wages and salaries by a certain percentage, whether agreed with trade unions or not, this
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