L’Europe sociale : créativité institutionnelle communautaire et réalités nationales

“Social Europe” has been constructed following 50 years of EEC and EU policy-making, which has gradually extricated social questions from a pure rationale of economic integration in order to turn it into a lever for European political integration. The theoretical and disciplinary viewpoints are presented that, together, help us better understand the processes at work. Attention is drawn to three of them. First of all, the evolutionary process of building the EU accounts both for the differences between social Europe and national welfare systems, and for an ongoing process of institutional creation through an accumulation of EU legal achievements (acquis). Secondly, the expansion of the EU to twelve new member states lacking robust labor relation systems, along with globalization, represents a challenge for the future of the “European social model”. Finally, social Europe has not yet undergone an assessment. Problems arise owing to the short shrift given by treaties to questions of social legislation or redistribution, but the “Europeanization of national policies” apparently opens a way toward overcoming these obstacles.     

La responsabilité sociale des entreprises, un projet européen en panne

The European Union (EU) has developed a special approach to corporate social responsibility by incorporating it into its strategies of employment and social cohesion and of sustainable development. This should make it possible to diffuse the European social model inside and outside the EU. Through an unprecedented dialog between institutions and “civil society”, the EU planned to explore the possibility of a consensus on a framework for corporate social responsibility. This article seeks to shed light on the perilous disconnection between European institutions, companies and society at a time when the corporate social responsibility practiced by European firms has turned into a vector of innovation in labor relations by becoming a subject of transnational negotiations. It has also become a litmus test of the limits of a self-regulation, worldwide, of labor questions.     

Les politiques d'emploi et la transformation des normes : une comparaison européenne

Given the central orientation of the European employment strategy — adapt unemployment compensation systems so as to broaden access to jobs — the effects of policies in this field are examined by focusing on three axes: the impact on unemployment; the action on employment standards, and trends in the social regulation underlying these policies. A comparative view reveals how much national systems have been able to interpret EU objectives in their own way. This does not invalidate the pertinence of a European level of regulation,but it does expose the conditions for clarifying standards for public actions and leading actors to become involved in EU institutions, a source of legitimacy still to be constructed. This comparison of six national cases (Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom) sheds light on the importance of the social compromises that set the framework for job polices. The quality of occupational transitions is related to the ability of actors to jointly regulate employment policy and labor market standards. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

Vers une représentation européenne des salariés. Les comités d’entreprise européens face aux restructurations

Nearly 900 European works councils (EWCs), transnational committees for informing and consulting workers, are now active in firms operating across borders inside Europe. How do they help establish a European industrial relations system? How have these new forms of representation been molded into a collective actor that is making itself heard at the EU level, in particular when the firms where EWCs exist are to be restructured? The intent is to see how an “additive logic”, whereby the EWC is the sum of the representatives of the firm's European workers, turns into an “integrative logic”, whereby the EWC becomes the place of a European representation of these workers. This study follows European works councils from the negotiations leading to their creation to their activities in coping with economic restructuring. It shows how they take part in the Europeanization and renewal of collective action in the social Europe under construction.     

L’Europe et les États-providence

This analysis of the EU's influence on the future of national welfare states points out three distinct phases in the interactions between the building of Europe and of welfare states. During a phase of expansion (1950s-1970s), European authorities were building a common market while allowing member states that were lagging behind in welfare to catch up. During a second phase of conflict (1980s-1990s), advances in the economic construction of Europe caused tensions to flare up with social policies inherited from the past. During a third phase (starting in the late 1990s), EU authorities have been trying to reconcile economic policies with new social policies. To analyze each phase, we must take into account both the EU initiatives capable of having a direct or indirect impact on national welfare systems and the national welfare institutions and strategies that were adopted.     

Wage Differentials of Transportation Industries: Deregulation Versus Regulation

This article investigates the wage differentials of similar occupations in three for-hire transportation carrier industries, railroad, truck, and motor bus, under regulation and deregulation. The estimation results indicate that the union wage gaps among all occupations have widened under deregulation. Specifically, the union wages of railroad occupations have increased relative to those of truck drivers and the union wages of truck drivers have increased relative to those of motor bus drivers. Further, wage gaps for all occupations for this period are greater among nonunion than among union workers.     

Une privatisation inédite de la norme : le cas de la politique comptable européenne

EU member states have, for a long time, been harmonizing their accounting rules in order to facilitate comparisons among countries. A new regulation in 2002 has suddenly sped up this process. Under it, companies quoted in the stock exchange are, since 2005, required to comply with the standards set by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), a private body without any public mandate. After trying to harmonize its members’ standards, the EU’s decision to resort to private subcontracting is even more puzzling given the Union’s lack of any statutory control over the IASB. In this impressive case of the privatization of a regulatory process, attention is focused on the incorporation of IASB standards in EU law and on the structure and governance of this board. This transfer of power is much broader than usual forms of delegation to the private sector. Although several reasons underlie this relinquishment of public authority, the primary one lies within the EU itself.     

« Adieu les artistes, here are the managers » : les réformes managériales au sein de la DG Développement de la Commission européenne

The managerial reform of the European Commission's DG Development-formerly DG8-started in the 1990s. Placed in a historical perspective, this reform is seen as the temporary outcome of a long process for bureaucratizing an institution marked, since its origins, by the pervasiveness of patronage. The sociology of the principal parties involved in the DG8 and their changing coalitions are linked to the powers and instruments successively used to establish this institution's authority and legitimacy and to professionalize its procedures for allocating aid to countries in Africa, the Caribbean Basin and the Pacific. Light is shed on this incomplete bureaucratization, punctuated by successive expansions of the EU, as new member-states have sought to rationalize the DG's operations in order to better control it.     

De la vigne à la rue : la difficile mobilisation des petits viticulteurs dans le département de l’Aude

The European Commission's specialized services are trying to tighten their grip over viticulture by invoking the legitimating figure of a “new consumer”. Accordingly, growers who work small vineyards are unable to make a wine adapted to market trends. They should, therefore, withdraw from wine-growing and enjoy the subsidies granted by the EU for uprooting vineyards. In Aude Department, southern France, small wine-growers take issue with this analysis, which, in their opinion, caves in to the pressure exerted by traders and hypermarket chain stores. However, there have been no protest actions against the Commission's decisions. This can be explained by the way the EU's policy is embedded in national and local conflicts. Although we cannot point to any joint plan, administrations, trade associations and political parties are developing practices that prevent organized protests.     

L’après-communisme et le déclin du syndicalisme à l’Est : leçons de Pologne et d’ailleurs

Trade unions in Eastern Europe have declined in almost all aspects since 1989, due not just to economic restructuring but to subjective factors such as reactions to communist-era legacies and skilled workers’ animosities towards the unskilled, which made union officials themselves skeptical of the value of unions. Starting around the turn of the new century, however, five factors now favor revival: survival imperatives of the union bureaucracy, incorporation into the European Union, emerging cross-border labor solidarity, a new generation of workers, and the end of postcommunism in the firm, or the dismissal of unessential workers, which means union officials no longer need to defend the unskilled. Three obstacles, however, continue to work against union revival: ideological (continued distrust of unions), organizational (plethora of small firms), and structural (location in the global economy). Organized labor is likely to remain weak, with a few stronger unions emerging in the manufacturing sector that are more elitist, male, and less class oriented than those in the past, while unions chiefly in the public sector would flounder. Such an arrangement is not conducive to stable liberal democracy.     

Les registres de l’action syndicale européenne

This study of how trade union actions have been shaped at the EU level is based on an analysis of the archives of the European Trade Union Confederation. It sheds light on a historical process that has fostered four types of action that now organize European trade union representations. The gradual formation of these types is described while pointing out the causes and explaining their rationales. Emphasis is placed on the complex process whereby institutions have shaped the thinking and acting of trade unions at the EU level. The way that unions form a framework for their practices has effects back upon the shaping of the collective organization.     

Le syndicat des travailleurs domestiques de Rio de Janeiro : un observatoire des transformations de l'emploi domestique au Brésil

This study of the major dimensions of actions undertaken by the labor union for household employees in Rio de Janeiro shows how the new “social rights” extended to these personal service workers has led to a new sense of what is “fair” and to an increase in lawsuits with employers. Given its place in labor relations courts, the union's position is ambivalent. Light is shed on the tensions between various categories of persons who visit the union's offices — tensions that tell us much about social relations. Attention is then turned to this small organization's role in labor courts: after cases have been heard, household employees often have a feeling that their rights have been upheld.     

Privatisation des télécommunications et relations de travail en Amérique latine

This article deals with the privatization of telecommunications in the three largest Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Labor unions have strongly affected the way telecommunications have been privatized in Latin America and its timing, but they have not been able to keep their traditional influence from waning. Comparing Argentina and Mexico brings to light opposite models of labor relations based, for the one, on the denationalization of management and loss of guaranteed jobs for wage-earners and, for the other, on the maintenance of control over telecommunications by local entrepreneurs and the preservation of guaranteed employment. The more recent privatization implemented in Brazil has fueled debate about the consequences on collective action in an era of open-market telecommunications. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Labor policy in the EU: The new emphasis on education and training under the treaty of Amsterdam

Labor market policy in the EU is seemingly a rather different animal today than heretofore because of the belated recognition that healthy employment development is the precondition for achieving fair and decent social and working standards. The pursuit of often ambitious mandatory labor standards appears to have been downplayed, and the notion of coordination to have superceded harmonization. The new means of coordination (via national employment plans) is benchmarking, identifying best-practice measures in employment policy, and offering encouragement to member states to progressively develop their own policies in this light. The presumed goal is to secure meaningful common action in the context of institutional diversity in national labor markets —the perennial problem in EU social policy formation. I review the new employment strategy with special reference to its education and training components ajid in the process question whether recent developments presage a sea change in the evolution of Community labor policy. ” If I were to set the process of uniting Europe in motion once more, I would start with education.” (Jean Monnet) This is a revised version of a paper presented at the First Biennial Conference of the Hong Kong Economic Association, Hong Kong, December 16, 2000.     

Airline deregulation and the airline labor market

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 has had a significant impact on the airline industry and its labor market. The structure of the airline labor market before the Act is examined in light of certain significant historical events including legislative intervention and regulatory practice. The Act and other coincident extraneous events are considered to show how deregulation and other unrelated economic and technological factors operated as a catalyst, sparking substantial short-term upheaval in the airline labor market. It is argued that in the longer term airline employees have little to fear from deregulation and that deregulation may eventually enhance labor’s position in view of the increased employment opportunities that an expanded market may bring and the abolition of the industry strike insurance scheme. I thank Bo Carlsson, Paul Gerhart, and Paul Salipante for their comments and suggestions.     

Fatigue management by truck drivers in real life situations: some suggestions to improve training

Truck driver fatigue is a major safety issue for truck drivers and the public in general. Although training prepares drivers to effectively operate a truck, it tends to minimize the importance of working constraints faced daily on-the-job and thus reduces its impact on safety and effectiveness. With experience, drivers develop skills to combat fatigue. Documenting these skills can contribute to improved training of apprentices. An ethnographic approach was used to better understand the real-life fatigue management skills of truck drivers. Participant observation was used to analyze the activity of apprentices in training and the activity of truck drivers at work. Observations indicated that training focused on time management and regulations, but did not prepare trainees to manage real-life constraints. Experienced drivers were not merely managing time; rather they were managing working constraints (including time) as a whole. To do so, they used two strategies: managing psycho-physical transformations and dynamic work planning. By integrating psycho-physical preoccupations into all aspects of work and by preparing future drivers to face real-life constraints, we could better train and prepare apprentices. Drivers do develop effective skills to combat fatigue which can improve training and better prepare future drivers to face daily constraints. These improvements can have a significant impact on fatigue and safety in the transportation industry.     

Des « employeurs multiples » au « noyau dur » d'employeurs : relations d'emploi et concurrence sur le marché des comédiens intermittents

Managerial literature sometimes uses an ideal-type of contingent labor to describe what it imagines to be future changes in organizing work and labor. These changes would entail a shortening and, therefore, multiplication of labor contracts. Statistics on the intermittents du spectacle (an administrative category in France referring to performers as well as stagehands who work for the duration of a project in show business, television and the performing arts) are analyzed to show that the conception of work in the media industry, as reflected in the aforementioned writings, cannot account for the actual plurality of relations between these part-time employees and their employers. In the media industry labor market, two types of labor relations can be distinguished. The one is close to the ideal-type of an intermittent employee who has occasional relations with his employer, whereas the other is based on a “hard core” of employers with whom an employee has recurrent relations. This core significantly affects the number of engagements of these performing artists and contributes decisively to the stability of their careers.     

Health care risks and access within the community of Michigan over-the-road truckers

This mixed methods study explored health care access problems faced by long-distance truck drivers. Thirty trucking professionals were interviewed at truck-stops in Michigan about health status and health care access. Thirty of the 88 drivers approached participated. The most common illnesses they reported concerned the eye, back, excessive stress at work and painful joints or arthritis. Most respondents had a family doctor; for those who did not, cost was a major contributing factor. More than one third stated their health is "not excellent" because of poor accessibility to healthcare on the road. Almost unanimously, drivers desired to have access to health care clinics in truck-stop areas and described particular access problems; the solution may be as simple as making the existing health care system more amenable to those driving large truck rigs.     

Politique et expertise scientifique. La régulation européenne des médicaments

A study of the EU system for regulating medicinal products is used to show the usefulness of distinguishing between policy-making and scientific expertise when analyzing political decision-making. This approach presupposes identifying the characteristics of scientific expertise. The experts responsible for assessing drugs have to combine knowledge and action. Questions are raised about how work is shared between decision-makers and experts. In the case of medicinal products, the work of experts has absorbed decision-making. Lest we waver between explanations in terms either of science or else of politics, it is necessary to substantively identify expertise’s political dimensions. Two conceptions — the “healthy man’s” and the “sick man’s” — of the purpose of assessing medicinal products stand out in debates; but political authorities pay no heed to them.