All in it Together? The Unlikely Rebirth of Covid Corporatism

Abstract

The battle to soften the labour market impact of the pandemic has thrown up some unlikely bedfellows, with trade union leaders competing with business chiefs over who can most fulsomely praise the government’s economic response. But does this entente really presage a new era of ‘Covid‐corporatism’? Crises like Covid‐19 can provide opportunities for temporary social pacts, even in countries lacking the labour market institutions needed to sustain these in normal times, and the ‘social partners’ have shown an unusual willingness to be bold and constructive. But cracks are already appearing over how and when the state should begin its withdrawal from the economy. Unions face structural weaknesses and recruitment problems that will hamper their ability to take full advantage of what will likely prove to be only a temporary lull in hostilities.

Crisis corporatism 2.0? The role of social dialogue in the pandemic crisis in Europe

“…The experience of the previous recession underscores the finding that, in contexts where societal trust towards social partners is high (Culpepper and Regan, 2014) and where policy-makers hold positive views of the past legacies of social concertation as a facilitator of structural adjustment reforms (Tassinari, 2021), governments might be more inclined to initiate formal social dialogue than in contexts where these conditions are absent. However, also in this respect, the exceptionality of the health emergency might override prior legacies, inducing policy-makers to re-engage with previously discredited or sidelined practices of tripartite social dialogue (Coulter, 2020).…”

“…The seemingly ‘symmetric’ nature of the shock, at least in the first months, did not lend itself to the logic of attributing blame for the crisis to a specific segment of society. In this respect, at its outbreak the COVID-19 crisis lent itself more easily to an ‘all in it together’ crisis narrative (Coulter, 2020) than was the case with the 2008 Great Financial Crisis or the eurozone sovereign debt crisis of 2010–2012, where competing narratives of blame attribution confronted one another. Second, the stakes involved in short-term crisis management – literally questions of life and death – could, in theory, have acted as a higher-order imperative incentivising stakeholders to put aside ‘particularistic’ interests in the name of societal unity of intents.…”

“…Second, the stakes involved in short-term crisis management – literally questions of life and death – could, in theory, have acted as a higher-order imperative incentivising stakeholders to put aside ‘particularistic’ interests in the name of societal unity of intents. Third, as an unusual shock hitting both supply and demand, the immediate economic dimension of the COVID-19 crisis required solutions going beyond the usual arsenal of tools available to the state and capital in response to downturns, such as mass mobilisation of the labour force, and therefore requiring some experimentation and possibly the forging of novel compromises between capital and labour (Coulter, 2020).…”

Vulnerable bodies and invisible work: The Covid-19 pandemic and social reproduction

“…Although at the outset of the pandemic, the public discourse in many countries, including the UK, was punctuated by a new sense of solidarity and collectivism – that we were ‘all in this together’ (see Coulter, 2020), this has increasingly given way to the more utilitarian argument that some human lives may need to be sacrificed in order to keep the economy from collapsing (see van Uden and van Houtum, 2020). This narrative draws clear distinctions between ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies, marginalising and stigmatising the latter and viewing them as direct obstacles to economic progress.…”

Pandemics, politics, and the resilience of employment relations research

“…Alongside these substantive employment issues, there is also a greater interest in the way questions of collective worker participation in the workplace, but also at the level of the state, have been emphasised as ways of creating a more effective and engaged response based on sustainable and decent forms of work (Coulter 2020). How this new interest in the policy role of unions within government and employer circles develops, however, is unclear especially in more liberal market models.…”