Striking a balance? Flexibility and security in collective bargaining

Christian Lyhne Ibsen and Mikkel Mailand
Additional contact information
Christian Lyhne Ibsen: FAOS, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, cli@faos.dk
Mikkel Mailand: FAOS, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2011, vol. 32, issue 2, 161-180

Abstract: Often neglected in flexicurity studies is the question of how collective bargaining contributes to the development of flexicurity , despite the continued resilience of this form of regulation in many European countries. The article compares sector-level bargaining and flexicurity in the printing and electrical contracting industries of Denmark, Spain and the UK to assess this link. In line with prior research, the article finds that Danish agreements contribute significantly to flexicurity. Somewhat against conventional expectations, however, are findings in the UK and Spain. In the UK, agreements contribute significantly despite a hostile context for collective bargaining. In Spain, due to the heavy influence of legislation the contribution is more modest but nevertheless notable. This overall finding gives strong evidence for the proposed link. The article goes on to discuss if a positive contribution is facilitated by certain institutional and relational conditions.

Keywords: comparative industrial relations; flexicurity; sector level (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X10371695 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:32:y:2011:i:2:p:161-180

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X10371695

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().