The Time is Now: Rebuilding Collective Bargaining in Europe.

5 min read

The next few years will be crucial in the long-needed restoration of collective bargaining in Europe. After decades of deliberate destruction, the EU has turned the corner with the passing of the EU minimum wage law. Now, the ball is in the member states’ court to make an effective and ambitious restoration project work. But the EU can and should do more to nudge them towards.

"The time is now". When Moloko’s lead-singer Roisin Murphy released this disco anthem in 2000, collective bargaining coverage in Europe was around 70 per cent. Now, some 20 years later, that coverage has fallen by more than 10 percentage points to below 60 per cent. This means that roughly 20 million employees less are enjoying the protection of a collective agreement.

This decline has been largely man-made through deliberate EU and national policies to weaken trade unions and decentralise collective bargaining. The argument was that these 'labour market rigidities' were holding back growth and progress.

They could not have been more wrong. Study after study laid out the negative consequences of these policies: risinginequality, in-work poverty, stagnating wages and an overall drag on growth and employment.

Slowly but surely, the EU's politicians and bureaucrats began to admit their mistakes. In the last mandate, the EU introduced the Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages, guidelines on bargaining for self-employed workers, a directive for platform workers, and a communication and recommendation on social dialogue and collective bargaining.

But while the political tide may have turned at EU level, it is now time for concrete, decisive and ambitious action at national level. In the coming months and years, member states will have to implement the directives and draw up action plans to promote collective bargaining.

Fortunately, they can build on a broad consensus: To promote collective bargaining effectively, countries need to invest in the capacity of workers' (and employers') organisations to engage in multi-employer bargaining. Furthermore, given the increasing importance of private services in the economy, and the specific challenges collective bargaining faces in those sectors, particular attention to private services is warranted.

To provide food for thoughts in this process, UNI-Europa – the European trade union federation and voice of 7 million services workers – has consulted dozens of experts, collected 140 pages of ideas on how to promote collective bargaining and built an interactive website on the benefits of multi-employer bargaining.

With the ball in the court of the member states, does this mean the European level is off the hook? By no means.

Years of anti-bargaining policies have created a number of obstacles at the European level. One example is public procurement.

In theory, the EU's public procurement directive aims to promote social procurement; in practice it does nothing of the sort. The rules are so focused on low-cost competition that the few public authorities’ attempts to spend socially end up in court, or require a mass mobilization of public resources like in Berlin.

So most public contracts are awarded by looking at the price only. And that’s bad. If companies win public contracts mainly by focusing on the lowest price, labour-intensive companies with collective agreements and decent work are at a big disadvantage.  Take the cleaning contracts for Belgian railway stations, the Danish contracts for interpretation or the public bus debacle in Bratislava. Lowest price tendering means contracts going to companies that avoid collective bargaining and cut corners on all fronts. It’s clear that the current public spending in the EU is often an obstacle to collective bargaining.

But a growing coalition has put this issue on the top of the EU agenda. Since the launch of UNI Europa’s #ProcuringDecentWork campaign three years ago, over 180 Members of European Parliament, an EMPL Committee study, the European Court of Auditors, researchers, experts, social partners in cleaning, security and catering have all come out in support of changing EU public procurement rules as to ensure that public money goes to companies that have and respect collective agreements.

The EU should seize this momentum and reform the EU Public Procurement Directive during its next mandate. When it comes to using one of the most powerful levers public authorities have – their purchasing power – Moloko's words hit the nail on the head: "Let's make this moment last".