Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses the results and non-results of the social dialogue at interprofessional level. It provides an account of the most notable approach to tackling this issue - the voluntary and informal coordination of national collective bargaining policies between trade unions from different European Union (EU) Member States under which bargaining remains strictly at national level but is transnationally coordinated. The book summarises the existing evidence from different aspects of the European employment strategy, with special consideration for its various stages of development, the role of the social partners, and the problems and prospects of its implementation. It concludes with a number of preliminary, empirically based, theoretical assessments of the specific, and in many fields novel, 'modes of EU regulation' which have characterised industrial relations developments since the 1990s.