Trade union responses to labour market activation policies are central to any assessment of their attitudes and strategies in the face of contemporary welfare state restructuring. Yet this issue has to date been the object of only limited theorization and minimal empirical investigation. We attempt to remedy this. Drawing on existing literatures in different disciplines, we first outline the theoretical grounds for predicting union opposition to or support for labour market activation measures. We then explore these competing arguments through a reconstruction and comparison of the development of union positions on labour market activation over time in two countries, France and the Netherlands. The case studies suggest that union stances on these policies are not straightforwardly determined by the structure of labour market institutions; considerations regarding the impact of activation initiatives on the role of unions in the institutions of the welfare state play a major role in mobilizing their consent or dissent.
Our paper charts the evolution of labour market and welfare policy in the UK since the mid-1990s, with the aim of gauging the impact and influence of European level policy initiatives on the policymaking process. Our main focus is on the 'welfare to work' agenda developed by the Labour government after 1997, a programme of changes to labour market regulation, social benefits, and labour activation institutions which in many interesting ways parallels the agenda of the European Employment Strategy.By analyzing the political context and discursive presentation of UK policy changes, we are able to make two paradoxical findings. On the one hand, recent policy in the UK has been remarkably in line with European initiatives to make the welfare state more employment-friendly, whilst at the same time strengthening egalitarian distributive policies. On the other, these policy changes have avoided evoking European initiatives at all costs, and indeed have drawn on other European experiences as a 'countermodel' against which UK policy has been framed. The contradictory result of these developments is that Britain has converged substantially with other European countries' welfare arrangements whilst rejecting Europe as a source of 'political cover' for welfare reform.
Though the response of trade unions to activation policies seems a crucial test of their capacity to adapt to the challenges of post-industrialisation, the issue has to date received little systematic attention in the welfare state or labour market policy literature. This paper takes a first step in remedying this curious neglect. Drawing on relevant theoretical literature it first briefly outlines two very contrasting perspectives on how unions' broad adaptation strategies could be expected to shape their attitude to activation reforms. It then analyses the role played by unions across around twenty years of labour market policy reforms in three strategically selected national case studies, confronting the differing assumptions to some preliminary empirical evidence. The cross-case evidence suggests that union attitudes to activation policies are rarely unambiguous reflections of either pure sectionalism or planned revitalisation platforms, but are instead shaped by a mix of strategic policy trade-offs, institutional incentives as well, at times, by the influence of new policy ideas.
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