ABSTRACT
Karl Marx proceeds in Capital, using a number of examples from modern capitalism, albeit it has to be stressed that the basic nature of economic ownership is universal, that is, it is present in other economic formations of society as well. The overall differences in wage developments between the countries in 1989-1995 are less than half the figures for 1960-1979 and substantially lower than in the 1980s. Employers and trade unions use international industrial statistics and trend extrapolations in conjunction with national and local negotiations. Wage standardization of the kind reported above is a more implicit process. That this kind of standardization may also be formally institutionalized is illustrated by the Belgian law of competitiveness, 1997—1998, which enacted a legal wage norm based on average wage increases in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Overall, trade unions seem to have become more active than employer federations in terms of adopting strategies aimed at improving cross-national cooperation in wage bargaining issues.
