ABSTRACT
The social dumping debate in Europe is taking place parallel to broader debates on the changing relationship between society and the market. Varieties of capitalism theorists argue that little has changed in Europe's advanced industrialized economies since the 1980s, aside from the expansion of the ‘peripheral’ workforce relative to the ‘core’ (Emmenegger et al., 2012). Most observers, however, see fundamental change, with detrimental implications for Europe's workforce – and not just labour market ‘outsiders’. According to the liberalization argument, for example, the problem is not only that of the increasing size of a less well-regulated workforce; in addition, the function of industrial relations arrangements is changing for those workers who are still covered by welfare state provisions, democratic co-determination rights and encompassing sectoral collective agreements (Baccaro and Howell, 2011). This process is biased against social protections for workers and the poor in part as a result of the corrosive features of the market-making regulations emanating from the institutions of the European Union (Höpner and Schäfer, 2010; Lillie, 2010; Meardi, 2012; Bernaciak, Introduction to this volume), in part owing to the domestic restructuring of firms and industrial relations systems (Doellgast, 2012; Greer et al., 2013) and in part because of generic features of capitalism (Dörre et al., 2009; Vidal, 2013).
