A revival of trade unions was widely expected when Blair’s New Labour government took over from the Conservatives in Britain in 1997. This did not occur. Collective bargaining continued to retreat. The paper discusses the implications of the changing economic context for the government’s...

In July 2007, the Prodi government and representatives of the three main Italian trade union confederations signed a landmark agreement on welfare and economic development. In October, in order to ratify or reject the agreement, the Italian labor movement organized a referendum, i.e. the...

We develop a theoretical model of retail competition that include two sources of quality, one inherently linked to brand characteristics and the other linked to the retailer level of service. We then measure their contribution in explaining the observed price differentials for a sample of U.K....

To improve their competitiveness the companies aim to increase the funds available to finance the necessary investments. In order to reduce wage costs company-specific deviations from industry-level wage contracts are concluded. Company-level pacts between the management and the works council...

This paper addresses the design of the machinery of collective bargaining from the perspective of the needs of microeconomic and macroeconomic flexibility. In the former context, greater attention is given over to enterprise flexibility than external adjustment. In the latter context, close...

To improve their competitiveness the companies aim to increase the funds available to finance the necessary investments. In order to reduce wage costs company-specific deviations from industry-level wage contracts are concluded. Company-level pacts between the management and the works council...

Der vorliegende Report berichtet über die Tarifverhandlungen im 2. Halbjahr 2018. Im 1. Halbjahr hatte es bereits Tarifverhandlungen in wichtigen Branchen gegeben, beispielsweise in der Metall- und Elektro-Industrie, im Öffentlichen Dienst (Bund und Kommunen) und im Bauhauptgewerbe. Im 2....

Der vorliegende Report berichtet über ausgewählte Tarifverhandlungen im 1. Halbjahr 2019. Wie schon im Vorjahr stand neben den Entgeltforderungen der Wunsch nach neuen Wahlmodellen auf der tarifpolitischen Agenda der Gewerkschaften. Bei diesen Wahlmodellen handelt die Gewerkschaft eine...

Es gibt gute Gründe, die jahrzehntelang eingespielten Muster der Tarifpolitik kritisch zu hinterfragen. Für einen besonders problematischen Aspekt liefert das aktuelle Jahr 2019 ein gutes Beispiel: Die Ergebnisse von Tarifvertragsverhandlungen weisen aus betriebswirtschaftlicher Sicht ein...

We develop a model of strategic networks in order to analyze how trade unions will affect the stability and efficiency of R&D collaboration networks in an oligopolistic industry with three firms. Whenever firms settle wages, the complete network is always pairwise stable and the partially...