Social Standards

Topics | Wages

Collective Bargaining

Despite ever closer economic ties, different cultures of collective bargaining have been maintained in the individual member countries and various types of employment have emerged:

• the social partnership model, mainly in the Scandinavian and the German-speaking countries,
• the strongly politically oriented type, e.g. in Italy, France and Spain,
• the Central European types that still have a very strong company orientation.

The different cultures are also reflected at the level of collective agreements. Central agreements are conducted in the social-partnership countries, whereas for the Central European types, the bargaining takes place more at a company level.

Over the past years, however, a perceivable shift has taken place. In many of the social-partnership types, the trade unions are often forced to enter into company-level agreements by the employers, aided and abetted by politically liberal and conservative forces. In the Central European countries, the trade unions are attempting to negotiate at a supra-regional level more and more. Their social power, however, is not so strong yet that any significant progress could be made.

Rate of unionisation in the company

	very good	good	satisfactory	not so good
Italy
Lithuania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Estonia
Finland
Belgium
Netherlands
Austria
Czechia