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Conclusion
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c h a p t e r e l e v e n Conclusion T he formation of the European single market and monetary union disadvantaged labor in many ways. Most important, the expansion of markets across national boundaries provided capital with increased options to exit the mid-twentieth-century class compromise that shaped labor relations and welfare states across Western Europe. However, unions had coped with a geographical expansion of capitalist markets before, namely, when governments created national markets during the nineteenth century. Although many local and craft-based unions perceived these national integration processes as a threat, labor eventually established effective national industrial organizations and developed new repertoires of collective action that were capable of shaping nation-building processes. Today we can witness similar developments in response to the EU integration process. Supranational corporate and EU governance structures not only put national union organizations on the defensive, they also triggered new forms of transnational union action. This supports the conclusion that neither diverse national identities nor the establishment of an integrated European market nor the formation of supranational EU governance structures preclude European collective action. On the contrary, our analysis shows that transnational collective action by labor is triggered not only by unions that politicize the supranational reorganization of firms and the increasing cross-mobility of workers but also by the contradictions internal to the EU integration process. By enabling collective action, unions empower otherwise isolated individuals to engage with governments, EU institutions, and firms. Labor [186] thereby performs a function essential to democracy. Likewise, union membership and collective bargaining remain significantly and positively associated with higher levels of political activism and electoral participation across Europe (D’Art and Turner 2007). However, although unions contribute to a democratization of the EU, they also adopt technocratic (rather than democratic) and national (rather than European) strategies in response to the EU integration process. Focusing on what unions actually do rather than on what their conference resolutions say, we have therefore assessed the impact of EU integration on two core functions of unions, namely, wage bargaining and job protection following corporate mergers and acquisitions. Explaining the Strategic Choices of Labor We have discovered that unionists who belonged to the same national organization and were facing similar constraints adopted very different European strategies in similar cases. Whereas labor oscillated between national and European strategies in the area of wage bargaining, the analyzed local-, national-, and EU-level unions adopted Euro-democratization and Euro-technocratization strategies in our transnational corporate merger cases. Comparing the Wage-Bargaining Coordination Cases Part II highlights the pressures that EU economic and monetary integration exerted on national wage-bargaining systems. In response, many national unions adopted a technocratic renationalization strategy in the form of social pacts, and other competitive corporatist arrangements, to gain a competitive advantage for domestic firms over companies from other countries. These arrangements implied substantial wage concessions , but unions hoped that wage restraint would be compensated by employment growth and a consolidation of their institutional role as a key player in labor relations. However, the more unions recognized that such a strategy was generating deflationary downward pressures on wage shares across Europe, the more they were led to seek an alternative. Because there was no prospect of European wage agreements, given employers ’ resistance and the lack of an EU income policy, several EU-level union federations adopted a European wage increase benchmark for national union negotiators in order to avert a competitive race to the bottom in wage levels. For the first time, national unions accepted an EU-level evalConclusion 187 [3.238.87.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:18 GMT) uation of their national bargaining policies. However, these coordination exercises were carried out by union experts without any rank-and-file involvement. In so doing, labor mimicked the dominant EU mode of governance , however, in its weak form of the so-called open method of coordination . Thus, these wage-bargaining coordination efforts represented, at best, a weak variant of Euro-technocratization that contributed little to the making of a more democratic EU. It does not follow from this that wage-coordination efforts are doomed to failure, but to be a successful tool they would certainly have to be more inclusive. Whereas the EMF shaped the wage bargaining coordination policy of the ETUC, construction-sector unions adopted a different Europeanization strategy. Instead of adopting EU-level wage bargaining targets as a means to prevent wage competition between workers from different countries...