Public Service Management and Employment Relations in Europe

Emerging from the Crisis

Stephen Bach, Lorenzo Bordogna, Stephen Bach, Lorenzo Bordogna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317529910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de recursos humanos

Has there been a transformation of public service employment relations in Europe since the crisis? Public Service Management and Employment Relations in Europe examines public service employment relations after the economic crisis, including analysis of more than thirty years of public service and workforce reform, and addresses the interplay between an emerging post-crisis public service sector and the consequences for the state, employers and trade unions in core public services.

Written by leading national experts, this book places the economic crisis in a longer timeframe and examines how far trends in public sector employment relations were reinforced or reversed by the crisis. It provides an up-to-date analysis of the restructuring of public service employment relations in 12 major European countries, including analysis of little studied central and Eastern European countries.

This book will be vital reading for researchers, academics and PhD Students in the fields of Public Management, Public Administration, Employment Relations, and Human Resource Management.

1 Emerging From the Crisis

The Transformation of Public Service Employment Relations?

Stephen Bach and Lorenzo Bordogna

Decades of public service reform have highlighted the extent of change in the organization and management of public services, but the consequences for public sector employment relations have been more ambiguous and less straightforward to categorize (Christensen and Lægreid 2011; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). As the economic and financial crisis took hold and austerity measures were adopted widely across the European Union (EU), it would be easy to assume that these uncertainties have been dispelled as far-reaching reforms of public service employment relations have been implemented in many EU countries.

This book has two main purposes. The first is to provide national studies of public sector employment relations in twelve EU Member States, both inside and outside the Eurozone. It is recognized that there are varied employment relations and administrative traditions within Europe, and this book covers the main countries that have been the focus of political economy, public management and comparative employment relations literature (Esping-Andersen 1990; Crouch 1993; Hall and Soskice 2001; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). We include countries with differing systems of public sector employment regulation and public management reform and consider how these differing reform legacies shaped each country’s response to the crisis as well as how pre-crisis patterns were affected. The dominant tradition in the public management literature is to focus on organizational reform, largely to the neglect of workforce issues, while comparative employment relations has paid limited attention to analysis of public management reform. By contrast, we encouraged contributors to connect employment relations and public management scholarship to develop integrated accounts of public sector workforce reform.

A novel feature of this collection is a recognition of the importance of Central and Eastern European countries, and by extending our analysis to a number of these countries, we start to address their neglect within studies of public management and comparative employment relations (for an exception, see Vaughan-Whitehead 2013). To maintain depth without sacrificing breadth, we limited the book to twelve countries: Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Britain, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Five of them do not belong to the Eurozone: Britain, Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary, while Slovakia joined in 2009. In each case, public service employment relations are examined within the wider context of national administrative systems, with particular attention to public management reforms that have occurred in most countries since the 1980s.

The second purpose of each chapter is to provide an in-depth analysis of the longer-term consequences of the economic crisis that erupted in 2008 and of governments’ responses in relation to public service working conditions and employment relations institutions and practices. The economic recession and ensuing sovereign debt crisis had immediate implications for the public sector (Bach and Pedersini 2013; Bordogna and Pedersini 2013; Vaughan-Whitehead 2013), and we develop these accounts of the crisis. Each chapter places these crisis effects in a longer historical time frame, assessing public management reforms from the 1980s, but also extending its analysis beyond the preoccupation with immediate austerity measures to consider the legacy of the crisis from the vantage point of 2015.

Accordingly, the structure of each chapter follows a common framework to facilitate comparative analysis and is organized around a set of core themes and issues. Each chapter identifies the main features of public sector employment regulation up to 2008, covering state, employer and trade union policies and highlights shifts in public sector employment relations during previous periods of public sector management reform. The volume provides both a detailed analysis of evolving systems of public sector employment relations that will be of value to policy makers and students of public management and comparative employment relations and contributes to scholarship on the effects of the crisis on public sector employment relations. In particular, it addresses whether the crisis, and governments’ policies in response to it, have had a temporary effect on public sector working conditions and employment relations or more enduring structural consequences.

In this introductory chapter, the focus is mainly on the second theme, namely on the question of whether the crisis has brought about a major transformation in public service employment relations in Europe or even a paradigm shift compared with pre-crisis patterns. A similar issue has been raised with regard to the United States’ experience. Katz (2013) questions whether the 2008 crisis brought about a ‘fundamental transformation’ in public sector labor relations similar to the radical change that occurred in the US private sector in the 1980s. In the private sector, this transformation was associated with a shift in bargaining power in management’s favor due to increased international competition, the growth of a highly competitive domestic non-union sector, the economic recession of the early 1980s and deregulation processes in several key industries (Katz 2013: 1031–1032). The conclusion reached by this analysis in relation to the public sector is negative, although with various qualifications. Are similar conclusions warranted in terms of the European experience?

To address this question, the chapter is organized as follows. The next section will present in a stylized way the key features of the two main public service employment relations models that prevailed in European countries until the 1980s. The following section recalls two decades of public service reforms often inspired by the new public management approach (NPM) and argues that the double process of convergence that NPM promised to deliver—across countries, and between the public and private sector in each country—did not materialize. We turn then to our core question: did the crisis, and governments’ response to it, bring about the fundamental transformation in public service employment relations that NPM-inspired reforms failed to deliver? As countries emerge from the crisis, is a paradigm shift clearly detectable? Or is the picture more nuanced, comprising both new and longstanding features, convergent and divergent trends, depending on country-specific legal and institutional traditions and related to the intensity of the crisis experienced by the different countries? To address these questions, we draw on Eurostat data primarily for the twelve countries that are the main focus of our analysis, but extended to a wider group of EU countries.

The Past: Two Models of Public Service Employment Relations and Their Distinctiveness

For about three decades after WWII, the public sector in Europe has comprised a key part of a system of social protection in which employers and trade unions cooperated with the state to coordinate and implement welfare policies, albeit with significant variations across countries, in particular between liberal-market and coordinated-market economies (Hall and Soskice 2001). The public sector, nurtured by Keynesian economic policies, became a very significant employer and comprised an integral component of the so-called full employment welfare state, mitigating risk from job loss and ill health and providing secure employment with high social standards (Hay and Wincott 2012; Gottschall et al. 2015). Central and Eastern European countries followed a different trajectory with a distinctive state socialist tradition, in which the autonomous role of the social partners was suppressed and welfare services were a low priority for the state. EU membership, however, exposed these countries to pressures to conform, bringing their administrative systems more into line with practice in other EU member states.

Within this context, public service employment relations were...