ABSTRACT
In chapter 6, Susanne Pernicka, Vera Glassner, Nele Dittmar and Klaus Neundlinger seek to better understand the contested Europeanisation of wage bargaining fields in the metal industry against the background of the global financial and European sovereign debt crises that unfolded after 2008. A key explanatory factor of (the lack of) their Europeanisation is the symbolic violence emanating from the European field of power. Given the higher appreciation of market competition in relation to collective solutions in governing the EU economy and wage setting being a competency of national bargaining actors, the authors expect weak horizontal Europeanisation processes of collective bargaining fields. Research findings illustrate how the appreciation of German and Austrian collective bargaining fields can be converted by associational actors to reinforce field autonomy, albeit with varying degrees of institutional conversion (organised decentralisation) and erosion (shrinking bargaining coverage). In contrast, Italian collective bargaining agents had to undertake enormous efforts to compensate for their weak position within the European field of power. Unlike associational actors in Portugal or Spain, Italian agents were able to mobilise domestic resources, including the still relatively strong dispositions of trade unions and employers’ associations in favour of collective bargaining, to avoid a complete decentralisation of collective bargaining.
