Is there hope for social solidarity and income equality in LMEs?

An analysis of labour market divergence in Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Colm McLaughlin University College Dublin

Chris F. WrightUniversity of Sydney

Overview • Consolidation of labour market liberalisation

(Baccaro & Howell, 2011; Avdagic & Baccaro, 2014)

• Revitalization of ER unlikely– Presupposes the nation state has capacity to act– Assumes that partisan actors would wish to strengthen

union influence and collective bargaining

• Convergence-divergence: – Focus mainly on CMEs– Colvin & Darbishire, 2013

• Deterministic and overly pessimistic

Research questions• How significant are observed differences in ‘non-

market coordination’ between LMEs?

• To what extent do politics and ideology account for these differences?

• Analysis of IR change in 4 LMEs:– Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom– Drawing on 110 interviews with government, union

and employer representatives

What are we trying to explain? The importance of small differences

• Australia– Restoration of the award system, collective bargaining– Regulatory innovation at the industry level

• Ireland– 20 years of social partnership, well documented– The ‘social turn’ 2004ff (Roche, 2012)– Aspects of coordinated bargaining reinstated: e.g. JLCs,

'right to bargain’, SEOs

• New Zealand & UK– bargaining remains highly decentralised and individualised

The role of politics and ideology in institutional change

• Thelen (2001, 2014): institutions survive because they are flexible not static

• Hauptmeier (2012): “institutions are what actors make of them”

• Culpepper & Regan (2008): union legitimacy• Hamann & Kelly (2003): electoral politics• Deeg & Jackson (2008): ideas • Hall (1993): policy paradigms

Australia

• “We had no influence. They were hell bent on listening to business. No one else mattered” (senior ACTU official)

• Unions “are doing something that people organically want and they use the institutions of power, including government, to deliver it for people” (senior Rudd/Gillard government minister)

Ireland• Social Partnership = Thatcherism delayed

(McDonough & Dundon, 2010) or 'competitive corporatism’ (Roche, 2007, 2012)

• Post crash, 2 factors at play in IR gains: – Politics: Union policy influence under the Fine-Gael

Labour coalition government…. Albeit limited by “ideological” troika

– Ideology: Unions retain public legitimacy

→ Base upon which to build post-troika

The UK and New Zealand• UK– “There was a neoliberal consensus which the Labour

government was part of and unions weren’t very successful in shifting them away from it” (senior TUC official)

• NZ– ECA “didn’t favour employers, it didn’t favour unions….

Whereas the ERA tilts the pendulum way over the fulcrum” (Business NZ official)

– “We’ve used up quite a lot of capital to get relatively moderate changes, though at the time it did not seem politically advisable to aim much higher” (NZCTU official)

Conclusion • IR actors have some agency to change institutional

arrangements to their own advantage - they aren’t simply determined by them, nor bound by globalisation pressures

• The legitimacy of actors and ideas and the role of politics (broadly defined) helps to explain the contrasting ability of IR actors to challenge dominant paradigms

• Concept of ‘fairness’ for a new policy paradigm?– Comparative research agenda that focuses on bargaining

mechanisms for low-pay