Peripheral convergence in the crisis? Southern and Eastern European labour markets and industrial relations

Introduction Debates on labour market and industrial relations convergence in the EU have been concerned mostly with two types of possible convergence: between liberal and co-ordinated market economies, and between East (new member states) and West (old member states). This paper argues that the most striking process of convergence, if a partial one, has actually occurred between South and East, towards a socially embedded but strongly segmented and politicised form of flex-insecurity. The paper compares the two largest Southern European EU countries (Italy and Spain) and the largest new member state (Poland), drawing on fieldwork and secondary literature on industrial relations and on labour market reforms since 2008, and especially changes in collective bargaining, trade union reactions, and labour market regulations. The crisis has changed the form of labour market governance at the EU level from a very ‘soft’ towards a ‘harder’ one, which however affects only peripheral and indebted countries, mostly in Southern and Eastern Europe. The first question that arises is whether the deep reforms in collective bargaining and employment protection, combining with rising unemployment and weakened trade unions, are pushing Southern European countries towards a combination of flexibility and insecurity that had so far characterised Central-Eastern Europe. The second question is whether those Central Eastern European countries that have managed to escape the worst consequences of the crisis, like Poland, have moderated their neoliberal reforms, converging towards standards that so far characterised South Western Europe.