Labor Markets, Production Strategies, and Wage Bargaining Institutions

Pontusson, Jonas; Swenson, Peter

doi:10.1177/0010414096029002004

Cited by 310 publications

(94 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The case of solidaristic wage bargaining in Sweden is a wellknown example (see, especially, Pontusson and Swenson, 1996). In the 1930s, Swedish employers pressed for centralized bargaining arrangements in order to link wages in the sheltered sectors to those bargained for in the export sectors.…”

Section: The Impetus For Institutional Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional change in varieties of capitalism

Hall

Thelen

2008

Socio-Economic Review

658

397

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Contemporary approaches to varieties to capitalism are often criticized for neglecting issues of institutional change. This paper develops an approach to institutional change more extended than the one provided in Hall and Soskice (in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001) but congruent with its varieties-ofcapitalism perspective. It begins by outlining an approach to institutional stability, which suggests that the persistence of institutions depends not only on their aggregate welfare effects but also on the distributive benefits that they provide to the underlying social or political coalitions; and not only on the Paretooptimal quality of such equilibria but also on continuous processes of mobilization through which the actors test the limits of the existing institutions. It then develops an analysis of institutional change that emphasizes the ways in which defection, reinterpretation and reform emerge out of such contestation and assesses the accuracy of this account against recent developments in the political economies of Europe. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this perspective for contemporary analyses of liberalization in the political economy.

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Section: The Impetus For Institutional Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional change in varieties of capitalism

Hall

Thelen

2008

Socio-Economic Review

658

397

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Much of the political debate which emerged in the 1990s discussed the consequences of excessive rent capture by public sector unions for centralisation. The experience most referred to was that of Sweden in the 1970s and early 1980s (Lash, 1985;Thelen, 1993;Iversen, 1996;Pontusson and Swenson, 1996). The inclusion of the low-productivity, public sector in centralised wage agreements not only placed an inflationary squeeze on the export sector, but also limited how much manufacturing employers could pay their (more productive)…”

Section: Rise Of Public Sector Wage Inflationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Revenge of Baumol’s Cost Disease?: Monetary Union and the Rise of Public Sector Wage Inflation

Johnston

2011

SSRN Journal

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Many political scientists and economists have addressed the implications of the public sector's sheltered status on their unions' wage strategies vis-à-vis the government. Since the public sector is a monopoly provider of necessary and price inelastic services, conventional wisdom suggests that public sector unions' push for wage increases which their productivity does not merit, exacerbating inflation and fiscal deficits. The argument in this paper challenges this conventional view, and maintains that the recent, puzzling rise in public sector wage inflation, relative to that in manufacturing, in Euro-zone countries is an unintended result of the institutional shift towards European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). During the 1980s and 1990s, differences in wage inflation between the manufacturing and public sector within most EMU candidate-countries were low. After 1999, these differences significantly worsened; wage moderation continued in the manufacturing sector while wage inflation arose in the public sector. It is argued here that monetary union's predecessors, the European Monetary System and Maastricht regimes, imposed two important constraints on public employers, which enhanced their ability to enforce wage moderation: the commitment to a hard currency policy via participation in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, adopted by some earlier than others and, the Maastricht criteria. Monetary union's removal of these two constraints weakened public employers' capability to deny inflationary wage settlements to public sector unions. Panel regressions results outline a statistically significant relationship between monetary union and higher levels of wage inflation in the public sector, relative to manufacturing. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of monetary union for inter-sectoral dynamics.

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“…41 Thus the Laval case presented an opportunity for Swedish employers to challenge existing Swedish labour and social policies at the EU level.…”

Section: Transnational Disembedding Of Markets? Laval and Vikingmentioning

confidence: 99%