The article addresses the question of the extent to which, and the reasons why, western European trade unions may have privileged the protection of 'insiders' over that of 'outsiders'. Temporary Agency Workers, among whom migrant workers are over-represented, are taken as test case of 'outsiders'. The findings from a comparison of Belgian and German multinational plants show that collective agreements have allowed a protection gap between permanent and agency workers to emerge in Germany, but not in Belgium. However, the weaker protection in Germany depends less on an explicit union choice for insiders than on the weakening of the institutional environment for union representation and collective bargaining. The conclusion suggests that European unions are increasingly trying to defend the outsiders, but meet institutional obstacles that vary by country. This article has three interrelated analytical aims. Firstly, through selected case studies within the same multinational companies affected by the same external pressures, it questions the role of efficiencydriven or rational choice-based explanations for using one extreme form of vulnerable work, namely temporary agency work. The cases illustrate diversity in the organisation of the use of agency labour that cannot be explained by company variables alone and require the consideration of social and political factors. Secondly, the article explores some of these factors by comparing 'most similar' cases, i.e. two neighbouring 'co-ordinated market economies' with similar welfare state models, but where temporary agency workers are subject to very different degrees of protection. The comparison allows to identify the importance of union power and related collective bargaining, and representation systems, and thereby to assess Palier and Thelen's (2010) argument more in depth. Thirdly, we go beyond existing institutional accounts by addressing agency and institutional factors together to tackle the underlying question of the extent to which the unions' role in co-organising dualisation depends on their political choices rather than on the environment they are in. 3The comparative perspective adds to the literature on labour market segmentation and on union responses (Benassi, 2013;Lillie, 2012;Doellgast and Greer, 2007;Hassel 2012), by looking in particular at the implications of power and the influencing factors. We propose to problematize the role of employers and trade unions beyond economic determinism and structural approaches that derive their roles merely from supposedly pre-existing interests. Instead, we pay deeper attention to the socio-political context in which the actors operate and which they concomitantly construct.Thereby, we aim to contribute to debates on social inclusion and dualisation by stressing the crucial role of institutionally situated micro-political games, where actors are strategic 'agents' within a context of power relations.The article is organised as follows. Firstly, segmentation debates are addressed and the rationale of a ...

The paper investigates local trade union influence on temporary agency work in four Belgian and German workplaces. It argues that the union's capacity to influence the job conditions of agency workers is heterogeneous. Societal differences between systems of workplace representation and the different structures of collective bargaining are used to explain the heterogeneity of local union practices and their effect on the working conditions of agency workers. These societal differences intersect with the socioeconomic conditions of the firm to generate local unions' responses to the management's use of agency workers.

This article aims to provide a better understanding of trade unions’ climate change strategies. Using a qualitative methodology based on an analysis of interviews and documents, the article sets out the three ideal-typical strategies of unions towards climate change mitigation policies: opposition, hedging and support. Our analysis finds that current trade union strategies on climate change are primarily rooted in sectoral interests mediated by union identities and conceptions of union democracy. At a theoretical level, the article contributes to broader debates on interest representation and collective bargaining behaviour by trade unions, in particular to the much-discussed tendency of organized groups to pursue private gains at the expense of common goods.

This article proposes a novel measurement model of labour market segmentation in Europe for cross-national comparisons, tackling three drawbacks of current approaches: First, as segmentation is a multi-dimensional concept, it necessitates a complex measurement approach combining several indicators. Second, to date, we lack methodological evidence that earlier used measures are comparable across countries. Third, as any measure of social phenomena contains measurement error, segmentation research may be confounded by misclassification error. To overcome these drawbacks, we argue for modelling segmentation as a latent categorical concept by means of characteristics of the employment relationship. Our analysis shows that accounting for measurement non-equivalence in cross-national labour market segmentation research is crucial to arrive at reliable and unbiased comparative conclusions. The results demonstrate the importance of increased complexity in measuring labour market segmentation. Overall, this article serves as a methodological cross-national comparative framework for future quantitative analysis of labour market segmentation.

This article examines institutional experimentation by linking the dynamics of capital accumulation, the adoption of new digital technologies within the labour process, and institutional settings. Our inductive qualitative case study within the service (logistics) sector in Europe sheds light on the processes through which local stakeholders engage in workplace change through institutional experimentation. It also illustrates how and under which conditions unions can act as political agents of transformation to influence work and employment.

Current research has shed critical light on the insecurity characterizing temporary agency work. To understand how this insecurity is produced, this article shows that we have to go beyond national and industrial regulation and analyse how this regulation shapes workplace practices and access to a collective voice. Thus, connecting the national and workplace levels is crucial in understanding job insecurity for agency workers. Job insecurity is shaped not only by the type of contract; it is primarily formed by how the national regulation, inclusive of collective bargaining and representation structures, shapes the modalities in accordance to which temporary agency workers are used at workplaces. The article is based on a cross-national comparative case study methodology, and compares two similar workplaces in two different institutional settings, those of Sweden and Belgium.

This article investigates the effects of crisis-related collective bargaining on different contractual groups of workers. Comparing four workplaces of two multinationals in Germany and Belgium in the recent economic crisis, the authors observe that Belgian unions could protect some temporary workers' jobs and when the crisis endured, the jobs and working conditions of the permanent workforces. In contrast, temporary jobs in the German workplaces were not protected and later on, the works councils had to concede on the permanent workers' working conditions to safeguard their jobs. This is explained by the intersection of institutional and firm-level differences which interacted to offer (or not) resources to unions to enforce protection.

In this comparative qualitative study, the authors examine how local bargaining shapes the trade-off between labor flexibility and employment security policies in four multinational subsidiaries in Belgium, Britain, and Germany. They also consider whether and how union power to shape flexibility and security policies is affected by national institutions, the way that multinationals organize their subsidiaries, and local contextual factors. Findings support this multilevel, interdependent framework. Trade-offs are shaped by differences in workers' structural power in specific local subsidiaries. Differences in inter-subsidiary organizational configurations, markets, and technologies modify how unions can leverage collective resources to wield power in their relationship with management.