Social partners' levers: job quality and industrial relations in the waste sector in three small European countries

• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12213
• Published date: 01 May 2018

Social partners’levers: job quality and

industrial relations in the waste sector in

three small European countries

Ole Henning Sørensen, Vassil Kirov and

Ursula Holtgrewe

ABSTRACT

This article examines how social partners in the waste sector in Austria, Bulgaria and

Denmark strive to protect job quality from negative impacts of two European trends:

privatisation and greening. The article uses qualitative, comparative research to ex-

amine social partners’levers for protecting and improving job quality. Three levers

are identified: negotiation power, collective agreements and general regulation that

facilitate negotiation and social partnership. In general, privatisation has had a nega-

tive influence on job quality and the levers of collective actors, whereas the impact of

greening is ambiguous, that is, not necessarily positive. The article concludes that

stakeholders’ability to improve job quality is contingent upon their activity on both

a national and European level.

1 INTRODUCTION

Male-dominated, blue-collar and with a visible impact of strike action, domestic

waste collection has traditionally been emblematic of union strength in the public sec-

tor in Europe. In Western Europe, waste collection has had a particular profile of

working conditions and job quality, often providing low-skilled workers with hard

work, but comparably secure employment, favourable working hours and pay, in ad-

dition to considerable discretion ‘on the road’.

In recent years, the waste collection sector has changed considerably. We observe

two distinct, partly conflicting and partly interacting trends. First, privatisation, that

is, liberalisation and restructuring, has increasingly decoupled waste management op-

erations from the public sector. Second, the sector is becoming an important part of

the emerging ‘green’economy and is thus influenced by environmental policies and

shifting definitions of responsibilities and resources (ILO, 2012). These two trends af-

fect social partnership and job quality in the sector. However, they may not affect the

sector in each national context in the same way.

❒Ole Henning Sørensen, Associate Professor, Behavioural Operations and Innovation Management,

Aalborg University, Copenhagen; Vassil Kirov, Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Societies

and Knowledge, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria and Ursula Holtgrewe, Dr. habil, Work &

Equal Opportunities ZSI - Centre for Social Innovation, Vienna, Austria. Correspondence should be

addressed to Ole Henning Sørensen, Department of Behavioural Operations and Innovation Management,

Aalborg University, A.C. MeyersVænge 15, 2450 Copenhagen SV,Denmark; email: ohs@business.aau.dk

Industrial Relations Journal 49:3, 242–258

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The embeddedness of the sector within national institutional contexts makes it

worthwhile to explore the privatisation and greening trends in specific countries’sec-

tor developments to study how social partners strive to protect job quality from the

potential negative impacts of these trends. We define job quality in line with Holman

(2013) as the extent to which a job has work-related and employment-related factors

that foster beneficial outcomes for the employee, particularly, psychological well-

being, physical well-being and positive attitudes, such as job satisfaction. In particu-

lar, we focus on health and safety, as well as working time and training.

To investigate how the two trends relate to job quality, we compare actor configu-

rations and social partners’methods of addressing job quality issues in a framework

that explores sectoral developments in different but comparable institutional environ-

ments. The study selected three European countries that represent different employ-

ment regimes (Gallie, 2007): dualist (Austria), inclusive (Denmark) and market

(Bulgaria). In the waste sector, the countries represent polar opposites in a ranking

of the implementation of European objectives for waste management performance,

with Austria and Denmark having the highest ratings and Bulgaria having the lowest

(Beratungsgesellschaft, 2012). The countries are small, and they are comparable in

terms of population size (5–8 million).

The objective of the article is to show how the two trends relate to job quality and

which levers stakeholders have to protect and improve job quality in each institutional

setting. The theoretical discussion raises three research questions. First, to whatdegree

is stakeholders’ability to improve job qualitycontingent on their position in the sector?

Second, whichlevers do stakeholders haveto protect or improve job quality?Third, how

do privatisation and greening relate to job quality and the levers of stakeholders?

First, the article describes the theoretical and empirical setting. Second, the article

presents the method and analysis framework. Third, it explores how stakeholders ad-

dress job quality issues, such as issues of health and safety, working time and training,

and conducts a thematic comparative analysis of processes shaping stakeholders’ac-

tions and institutional strength and weaknesses. Fourth, the concluding section dis-

cusses stakeholders’levers for shaping job quality.

2 TRENDS AND REGIMES: THE THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL

BACKGROUND

This section describes the trends of privatisation and greening in the public sector and

the European waste sector specifically and then addresses particularities of the three

selected countries’employment systems. Finally, we reiterate the article’s research ob-

jective and define three research questions to guide the analyses.

2.1 Public sector privatisation

Public sector privatisation is a central element of the liberalisation trends that extend

across employment systems. Stakeholders’capabilities are often not sufficiently strong

to maintain or improve working conditions in sectors that are being deregulated and

privatised.Generally, the research pointsto the risks that established industrialrelations

are disrupted and thatjob insecurity is increased when public services are privatised or

outsourced (Doellgast and Greer, 2007; Hermann and Flecker, 2012).

Brandt and Schulten(2008) describe the gradualdismantling of the traditional ‘public

sector labour relations regime’in Western European that used to consist of above-

average union density and influence centralised collective bargaining with low-wage

243Social partners’levers for protecting job quality

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd