No abstract

Job quality in the contracted-out public services is still influenced by the public authorities. As customers buying goods and services from private providers, they become with employer and employee representatives a more or less visible 'third party' in the determination of employment conditions. This article explores collective actors' strategies and negotiations in this triangular configuration. It develops an analytical framework, based on a discussion of recent legislative trends, then presents empirical findings from two recent comparative projects. These suggest that the extent to which public procurement can help to ensure decent work depends very much on the interaction with sectoral and national employment regimes; it requires complementary institutions to turn public procurement into a 'market-embedding' tool.

Through a cross-national comparative study of local government "best practice cases" of socially responsible procurement in Denmark, Germany and the UK, this article critically examines the role of labour clauses in addressing issues of low wages and precarious work in public supply chains. It provides new insights on the negotiations and outcomes of labour clauses across different stages of the policy process, including implementation and monitoring. The analysis demonstrates the importance of pragmatic alliances of progressive local politicians, unions, and employers in ensuring that socially responsible procurement moves beyond rhetoric, along with supportive national and sectoral employment regimes. Labour clauses can compensate for weak systems of labour market regulation by setting higher standards for outsourced workers, while they play a complementary role in more regulated labour markets by levelling up wages and working conditions to prevailing collectively agreed standards.

Drawing on the findings of research in the public hospitals sector in five European countries 1 -France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK-this article assesses the character of change in wage setting and collective bargaining. It demonstrates the diversity of national arrangements by comparing key characteristics: (i) the bodies of collective representation (unions, professional associations and employer bodies); (ii) the degree of integration with the wider public sector framework; (iii) coordination (or competition) with the private hospitals sector; and (iv) the practice of à la carte provisions within individual hospitals. Despite national varieties of wage setting and collective bargaining, each country sector faces similar tensions-most notably the opposition between public (labour market) rules and health (product market) rules, and pressures to segment or integrate employment conditions by labour force group. By examining the nature of change in institutions for wage setting and collective bargaining in each country, the article contributes to our understanding of the extent of coordination and change of public sector wage setting and describes three scenarios: fragmentation (Germany); continuity (France and the Netherlands); and reconstruction (the UK and Norway). 1 This article draws on the detailed assessments of changes in industrial relations, pay and work organisation in the public sector hospitals of France (Méhaut et al., 2008), Germany (Jaerhling, 2008), the Netherlands (van der Meer, 2008) and the UK (Grimshaw and Carroll, 2008), listed in the bibliography. These four country reports were prepared as part of a European project funded by the Russell Sage Foundation on low-wage work. Each report considered two occupational groups in detail, the nurse assistant and the cleaner. Detailed information for Norway derives from research conducted independently by Nirit Shimron that explores changes in wage-setting institutions in three sectors (hospital, banking and metalworking) in Norway, Germany and the UK.

No abstract