The Nordic Model - Embracing globalization and sharing risks

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Most of pay is in Denmark and Sweden negotiated at the level of the workplace or the individual – subject to a collectively agreed peace clause routine emerged, relying on informal coordination of pay claims by sectoral bargaining cartels. Co-ordination is facilitated by a new government authority, the National Mediation Office, which provides the labour markets organizations with wage statistics and descriptions of current collective agreements. White collar and professional unions have become increasingly willing to conclude pay agreements that leave the final determination of pay to individual negotiations at the workplace. At most, such contracts set a low minimum level of pay increases. Only a minority of employees in both the business and the public sector are covered by collective and general pay increases, and almost all professional employees conduct completely individual wage discussions with their employers. There is a great variety of contractual forms; some collective agreements just stipulate a peace clause or at most an “individual guarantee” of a minimum pay increase, remaining completely silent on the distribution of pay increases between individuals. The contrast is even starker between Finland and Denmark, where the role of collective agreements has increasingly been confined to the regulation of working hours, pensions, sickness and vacation issues. Thus, most private sector employees in Denmark now negotiate their pay directly with their employer, subject to a peace clause. The decentralization of pay bargaining in Sweden and Denmark has broadly coincided with increasing wage differentials between firms, in particular among white collar employees. In other words, the individual’s level of pay depends less and less on his/her observable characteristics and more and more on the firm or establishment where he/she works. 8 This is a general trend, which is visible also in Finnish earnings data, but the changes are more significant in Denmark and Sweden 9 . As expected, the dispersion of wage changes across individuals is in Finland and Sweden clearly lower than in Denmark (the dispersion also in Denmark remaining clearly smaller than in, say, the US). The change in firm-specific pay differentials can be related to institutional changes. In a recent report on Swedish wage formation, a clear correlation is reported between more individual contracts and changes in wage and salary distributions for many industrial sectors. 10 However, the evolution of pay differentials Wage bargaining with more flexibility · 123
also depends on the business cycle. In general, salary differentials increase in booms if collective contracts allow it. In recessions, by contrast, the earnings distribution is stable. Thus, it seems that firms reward some of their key employees in periods of high growth. At the same time, wage drift has been quite low in Sweden. The Swedish experience suggests strongly that it is possible to establish wage moderation in a strongly unionized economy without imposing uniform pay increases for all individuals. In fact, more individual pay bargaining has probably limited the rate of general wage drift, since individual wage determination makes it possible for employers to adjust relative wages with lower aggregate pay increases, as a part of the regular bargaining process. If the collective agreements leave a lot of room for relative wage adjustments at the local level, it is less likely that wage drift in excess of collectively agreed increases will emerge. There need thus be no contradiction between macroeconomic objectives and more individual and firm-specific pay bargaining. Opposition to more individual wage settlements in Finland often stems from a fear of an explosive increase in wage differentials. It is apparently assumed that the labour market institutions in the Nordic countries keep pay differentials (artificially) low. This conventional perception may be true to some extent, but we would not expect a very large increase in wage differentials even if pay bargaining were further individualized. There are several reasons for this. First, it is doubtful whether collective regulation could in the long term sustain a distribution of individual wages that deviates dramatically from the competitive wage structure. Second, the Nordic countries are well known for the equality of their educational opportunities and the absence of educational tracking in primary school. Thus, the relatively small wage differentials also reflect a relatively even distribution of productive abilities 11 . Empirical evidence for Sweden suggests that the effect of individualization of pay bargaining on earnings differentials is rather gentle. Most groups of salaried white-collar employees in Sweden moved into individual pay determination around the years 1997–1999. This was reflected in an increase in wage dispersion, Decentralization of wage formation has increased pay differentials somewhat – and has reduced wage drift A further decentralization or individualization of wage bargaining is unlikely to lead to a big increase in wage dispersion 124 · The Nordic Model
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The Nordic Model Embracing globaliz
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ETLA B232 ISBN 978-951-628-468-5 IS
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THE AUTHORS Torben M. Andersen is P
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CONTENTS PREFACE THE AUTHORS 1 INTR
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8.5 The future of public services -
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Globalization is primarily an oppor
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ices financed by taxes, which are h
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14, respectively, out of a total of
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are the effects of technical change
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- and, particularly, their effect o
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not contesting economic growth as t
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1.6 AN EFFECTIVE WAGE BARGAINING PR
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etter be tried in individual cases
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The scheme of the social contract c
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is worthy and realistic. But the de
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supportive interaction of openness
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The financial deregulations in the
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horizontal axis). These indices are
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does can nowadays be seen, in a bro
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employment increases in the public
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are not at the top of the league, t
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ENDNOTES 1 Wikipedia refers to popu
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consider employment and productivit
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from the mid-1980s. Finland has gra
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% 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 IT expenditure, %
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As technological change is to a sig
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3.3 SOCIAL EQUALITY Economic effici
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0.9 0.8 0.7 Net Fin Den 0.9 Composi
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ANNEX: GROWTH ACCOUNTING The Nordic
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sources of GDP growth in the EU15,
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11 These decompositions have been c
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4.1 THE WELFARE STATE AS A SOCIAL C
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The extent, coverage and quality of
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% % 80 80 60 60 40 20 0 OECD max Fi
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% 80 Total Old age % 80 60 60 40 40
Page 73 and 74: tem is seriously affected. Today, t
Page 75 and 76: Historically, however, the share of
Page 77 and 78: More children. Since the problem is
Page 79 and 80: Actually higher growth may make the
Page 81 and 82: dependency ratio driven by the baby
Page 83 and 84: 82 · The Nordic Model
Page 85 and 86: to handle much bigger fields today,
Page 87 and 88: Table 5.1 Projections of public hea
Page 89 and 90: 5.4 AN EASY FIX - BRING SERVICES BA
Page 91 and 92: Box 5.1 Growth and the welfare stat
Page 93 and 94: it implies that the long-run defici
Page 95 and 96: The level of taxation is already hi
Page 97 and 98: One may ask why this problem arises
Page 99 and 100: globalization may contribute to bot
Page 101 and 102: able to pay to seek private solutio
Page 103 and 104: 102 · The Nordic Model
Page 105 and 106: ily policies that Nordic demographi
Page 107 and 108: absolute and relative terms than hi
Page 109 and 110: in the participation decision of th
Page 111 and 112: Table 6.2 The activity rate, aggreg
Page 113 and 114: Thus, responsible unions should res
Page 115 and 116: als take part in various unemployme
Page 117 and 118: Box 6.2 What is the Danish “flexi
Page 119 and 120: ENDNOTES 1 In his history of the ec
Page 121 and 122: particularly noteworthy in a euro a
Page 123: 7.2 COORDINATION AND DECENTRALIZATI
Page 127 and 128: ut not in any dramatic way (cf. fig
Page 129 and 130: displays higher nominal rigidity th
Page 131 and 132: model stem from an age in which the
Page 133 and 134: mostly in the years 1980-2000. For
Page 135 and 136: Table 8.1 Government expenditure by
Page 137 and 138: ure. This selection bias alone will
Page 139 and 140: that everyone gets their worth as m
Page 141 and 142: 8.3 THE CASE FOR GOVERNMENT PROVIDE
Page 143 and 144: maximizing firms tend to focus exce
Page 145 and 146: than zero based budgeting) are impe
Page 147 and 148: sectors, place at or above the medi
Page 149 and 150: The demands for objectivity limit w
Page 151 and 152: assessed case by case. The importan
Page 153 and 154: c. Vouchers Vouchers are issued by
Page 155 and 156: mechanically in the political debat
Page 157 and 158: ENDNOTES 1 The private sector inclu
Page 159 and 160: The biggest hurdle to overcome for
Page 161 and 162: ment has a higher return when spent
Page 163 and 164: REFERENCES Adema, W. and Ladaique,
Page 165 and 166: Jonung, L. and Hagberg, T. (2005):
Page 167: Is there a Nordic model? What are t
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