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Social Dialogue Regimes: Worker Rights, Collective Bargaining and Negotiated Policy-Making

Annual Call for Projects 2003

Keywords

Collective Bargaining - Freedom of Association

Summary

The project aims at understanding the structural determinants (e.g., economic, social, cultural and institutional), as well as the socio-economic outcomes of "social dialogue regimes," i.e., socio-political regimes in which workers have freedom to establish organisations of their own choosing, negotiate collectively over working conditions, and participate through their associations in the design and implementation of policies that affect their lives.

At present, not much is known about the conditions in which social dialogue regimes emerge and reproduce themselves over time, and about the socio-economic outcomes (including macroeconomic performance) associated with them, in spite of the topic's importance. Two opposing views dominate this research field. On one hand, it is often argued that questions about worker rights, collective bargaining and negotiated policy-making can only be meaningfully addressed after countries reach a crucial stage of development. In the meantime, these considerations should not be allowed to interfere with the developing countries' main source of comparative advantage, namely low labour costs. On the other hand, it is also argued that unionisation, collective bargaining, and tripartism (discussions among government, workers and employers) should be encouraged and perhaps even imposed by national and international policy-making authorities. According to this second view, negotiated regulation is not just desirable for its ethical and political properties. It also has beneficial economic effects, because it contributes to ruling out the possibility of self-defeating approaches to economic development, based on low labour costs/low productivity strategies. Far from being the consequence of economic development, as in the previous view, labour rights, organizations and institutions are in this case regarded as its precondition.

This debate is of crucial importance, but has so far remained at a very general, almost ideological level, and has not led to mutually acceptable propositions. This state of affairs appears to be linked with a basic methodological problem. Good measurements of key constructs like worker rights, industrial relations processes, or negotiated policy-making are not available, particularly for developing countries. Consequently, the researchers' capacity to apply the tools of social science to the questions laid out above is necessarily limited.

This research project begins filling the aforementioned methodological gap. In fact, the first step in the project is the production of cross-country indicators of social dialogue in 60 countries - both developed and developing - at two points in time (i.e., 1990 and 2000). Social dialogue indicators fall into three categories: indicators of associational and collective bargaining rights; indicators of industrial relations structures and processes (unionisation and collective bargaining); and indicators of negotiated policy-making or tripartism. The aim of the latter is to capture the extent to which economic and social policies are co-determined by governments and the social partners (that is, trade unions and employer organisations), rather than being implemented by governments alone. Multiple methods will be used in the production of the indicators, including data mining, that is, systematic analysis of legal sources and questionnaires addressed to country experts.

The second step in the project combines quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis. First, statistical models - incorporating the newly-developed indicators as both dependent and independent variables - seek to uncover the broad structural determinants of labour rights, industrial relations processes, and tripartism, as well as some of the socio-economic outcomes associated with them. Second, four in-depth case studies explore the particular causal mechanisms through which particular factors combine with each other to produce outcomes, and to investigate country cases that appear to defy general trends. The selection of case studies is based on the results of the quantitative analysis.

This research project unites the efforts of numerous people from different professional, disciplinary, and methodological backgrounds - international civil servants from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and academics from the Universities of Geneva and Lyon, with the participation of external advisors from Cornell University (Ithaca, USA), the University of Bern and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne, Germany). The Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN) provides financial support for the project.

This research project promises to generate important information on the desirability of particular labour market institutions and on the conditions in which these institutional configurations are sustainable. This kind of information is crucial for both national and international policy-makers. The team members plan to write several academic articles summarising the results of their research. To ensure that the project results are adequately publicized and broadly discussed, an international conference will be organized at the end of the project to summarise the main results of the research. This will involve academics, international civil servants, and tripartite policy-makers, particularly from the countries selected for in-depth case studies.

The project will also contribute to build relationships with academic institutions and research centres in multiple countries. In fact, other researchers engaged in similar projects in the future could use the contacts and links created through the country questionnaires and the case studies.

The grant provided by the GIAN for this project totals SFr 248,800

> See shorter summary

Project Team

Research Output

Social Dialogue Regimes: Application of ILO Conventions on Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining (available in English and French) > more

Automatic Text Annotating: Methodology (available in English only) > more

Automatic Treatment of Legal Texts (available in French and English) > more

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