Industrial Relations in Europe 2012 - European Commission - Europa

In other countries, such as Malta, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, the institutions and mechanisms
to handle collective disputes are the same in the public and private sector.
Within this web of rules, or despite it, over the last decades there has been a shift of the relative
weight of labour disputes from the industrial/manufacturing sectors towards the (public) services
sector (EU Commission 2011; Carley 2010; Bordogna and Cella 2002; Shalev 1992). In recent
years, as a response to the economic crisis, this trend has intensified in several countries, especially
where austerity packages have particularly hit public employees, although with some exceptions,
such as many Eastern European countries (see also Chapter 4 of this report). Often, however,
workers’ protests have occurred in form of mass demonstrations, street violence and riots, rather
than strikes in the strict sense (Bordogna 2010).
3.9 Conclusions: Identifying clusters
From the point of view of public sector industrial relations the European Union looks like a ‘mosaic
of diversity’. Despite some trends towards convergence both between countries and between the
public and private sector within each national case, to a greater degree than in the private sector
employment and industrial relations are here deeply rooted in country-specific legal, normative and
institutional traditions that contribute to this diversity and make comparison difficult.
However, in summarising the key features of public sector industrial relations, five main country
clusters can be identified. Some have relatively strong common features, and are therefore clearly
identifiable, while in others marked diversities exist within the group.
A first, clearly identifiable group is that of the Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Finland and
Norway. The main characteristics of this group are: the largest, or among the largest (Finland), size
of public sector employment in the EU27, with a high female presence, and a strong welfare state;
significant harmonisation processes between career civil servants and employees employed on
ordinary contracts, although differences do persist in these countries; very high trade union density,
though declining slightly in recent years, and wide collective negotiations practices, within a rather
decentralised, two-tier bargaining system with strong and effective coordination mechanisms; few
restrictions on the right to strike, but special machinery for collective dispute resolution. Elements
of the NPM doctrine have been adopted, including forms of performance-related pay, but
incorporated within public administration systems that maintain some (neo-) weberian
characteristics (Pollitt et al. 2007; Ibsen et al. 2011). Partial differences relate to the incidence of
part-time workers (comparatively low in Finland), of temporary workers (very high in Finland and
Sweden), and of young workers (ratio with elder workers below 1 in Finland and Sweden). From an
industrial relations point of view, Ireland shares some features with this group of countries rather
than with the UK, to which it is often associated. The rate of unionisation is quite high, there is
special machinery for handling collective disputes in the civil service, and national ‘tripartite
concertation’ has an important regulatory role for central government employees, as in Finland.
This is despite difficulties in recent years and the fact that the single level bargaining system is in
itself more centralised than in the Nordic countries. Ireland has a public sector employment share
that is relatively high but lower than the Nordic countries, the UK and the Netherlands. The
incidence of women, part-time workers and, especially, young employees is relatively high, while
the presence of temporary employees is relatively low. The Netherlands also has some features in
common with this group, although its union density rate is notably lower and its two-tier collective
bargaining system is characterised by a weaker degree of coordination; other features of the
Netherlands, however, are probably closer to those of the following group.
Germany, France, Austria, and partly Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with a Rechtsstaat
tradition of Napoleonic or Prussian origin, have in common a strong component of career civil
servants, which make up a large proportion of central government employees, and in France almost
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