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
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