Unions and collective bargaining in the wake of the Great Recession: evidence from Portugal

John Addison, Pedro Portugal (pportugal@bportugal.pt) and Hugo de Almeida Vilares

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Against the backdrop of its industrial relations architecture, characteristic of the ‘southern European group’ and intimately linked to the recommendations of the Troika, this paper examines four key aspects of Portuguese collective bargaining. First, it provides definitive estimates of private sector union density for that nation. Second, it models the determinants of union density at firm level. Third, it yields estimates of the union wage gap for different ranges of union density. The final issue examined is contract coverage. The received notion that the pronounced reduction in the number of industry-wide agreements and extension ordinances of late is to be equated with a fall in coverage is shown to be a chimera, the number of workers covered by new and existing agreements remaining largely unaffected by the economic crisis. The reduced frequency of new agreements and extensions is instead attributed to downward nominal wage rigidity in low-inflation regimes.

JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-08-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Published in British Journal of Industrial Relations, 10, August, 2017, 55(3), pp. 551-576. ISSN: 0007-1080

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Related works:
Journal Article: Unions and Collective Bargaining in the Wake of the Great Recession: Evidence from Portugal (2017)
Working Paper: Unions and Collective Bargaining in the Wake of the Great Recession (2015)
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