Equal opportunities, collective bargaining and the European employment strategy
The European Foundation for the Improvement in Living and Working Conditions has conducted a five-year research project on collective bargaining and equal opportunities in the EU, identifying and analysing agreements with good potential for promoting equality, and exploring the process by which such agreements were reached. A final policy paper from the project, summarised in this EIRO comparative study, seeks to link the research findings to the European employment strategy developed by the EU, and especially the Employment Guidelines. The paper identifies some factors which can encourage the use of collective bargaining as an instrument for strengthening and mainstreaming equal opportunities, and offers some recommendations for action.
The European Foundation for the Improvement in Living and Working Conditions (EFILWC) has conducted a five-year research project on collective bargaining and equal opportunities in the EU, identifying and analysing agreements with good potential for promoting equality, and exploring the process by which such agreements were reached (TN9704201S). A final policy paper from the project, summarised here, seeks to link the research findings to the European employment strategy developed by the EU (EU9909187F), and especially the Employment Guidelines (Strengthening and mainstreaming equal opportunities through collective bargaining, Inge Bleijenbergh, Jeanne de Bruijn and Linda Dickens, EFILWC, December 1999). Strengthening policies for equal opportunities is one of the Guidelines' four "pillars" and equality is to be "mainstreamed" in the other three: improving employability, developing entrepreneurship, and encouraging adaptability of businesses and their employees. The social partners are given responsibility, together with Member States, for increasing women's employment rates, balancing the representation of women and men in certain sectors and occupations and improving career opportunities for women. Furthermore, the social partners, together with Member States, are exhorted to facilitate the reconciliation of work and family life and the re-entry of women into the labour market.
The report stresses the value of collective bargaining - as a complement to legislation - in: achieving a more flexible and tailored (and more acceptable and workable) approach in the promotion of equality; developing positive measures to promote equality rather than simply measures to counter discrimination; and giving women and men a voice in shaping their own working conditions, enabling them to define their own needs and interests and to set their own priorities.
In the past five years, the report notes, there has been growing consensus in the EU about mainstreaming equal opportunities within general policies. Since bargaining plays an important role in determining the terms and conditions of employment for large numbers of citizens, it is therefore a key mechanism for mainstreaming equality in employment. The equality potential of collective bargaining must be developed since, in its absence, bargaining may serve to underpin inequalities: "If collective bargaining lacks a gender perspective, it is very likely that agreements will institutionalise discriminatory practices, entrench rather than challenge gender segregation of work, and operate on a male norm of employment, to the obvious disadvantage of women."
The paper provides, as practical illustrations, examples of provisions in collective agreements which have the potential to lead to equality between women and men (though this potential has not always been realised in practice).
Collective bargaining and strengthening equal opportunities
Examples of collective agreements with provisions that are potentially good for equality can be found, to a greater or lesser extent, in all Member States. They can be found: in the public and private sectors; in manufacturing and services; at sectoral and company level; and in branches with varying levels of female participation. This suggests that there are no areas where collective bargaining cannot be used to promote and strengthen equal opportunities, although its use varies among and within the Member States.
The two key areas identified in the Employment Guidelines' equal opportunities pillar are tackling gender gaps and reconciling work and family life. These accord with areas of impact specified in the Foundation research to aid the identification of good agreements - reducing pay inequality, narrowing the "gender hierarchy", breaking down horizontal segregation, and encouraging a more equal distribution of paid and unpaid work between women and men. In addition, however, the research sought to identify agreements with the potential to change organisational cultures and structures.
Seeking to change organisations rather than simply "adapting women" is an important component of strengthening policies for equal opportunities. Gender gaps arising from sex segregation and pay inequalities are embedded in the "gendered" nature of employment organisations - eg the assumption that workers do not have domestic caring responsibilities and the undervaluing of work traditionally done by women. Tackling these issues calls for a critical review of organisational cultures and structures, in addition to particular measures directed at improving the entry of women into the labour market and their career progress.
There is evidence of collective agreements which address in general terms the obstacles to equal opportunities to be found in organisations' culture and structures. Such agreements do not (or do not only) focus on particular issues but are concerned with setting up positive action programmes, establishing procedures, fixing goals and providing funds. They attempt to integrate equal opportunities into human resources policy.
Examples of agreements in this area are provided in table 1 below.
| France | A 1991 equality agreement in a credit institution sought to improve job access for women and reduce sex segregation, particularly in management posts. The agreement featured parity representation at all stages. Equality was considered part of general management strategy. Two structures were established: a commission representing different occupations, trade unions and management, which meets at least once a year to review progress and prepare fresh proposals; and a smaller body comprising management and employee representatives, which meets as frequently as necessary to ensure the agreement's implementation. |
| Germany | A 1990 agreement at Frankfurt airport treats equal opportunities as an integral element of human resource development, emphasising training. It has provisions on: the family/work interface, including career breaks; working time, including part-time and flexible working hours; job access/sex segregation, including the promotion of women, a "promotion pool" for female staff, a policy on advertisements, selection procedures and special training; and a programme to sensitise organisational culture and structures to equal opportunities. The agreement is implemented through an active information policy and the creation of a special commission. |
| Spain | A collective agreement covering a number of government institutions set up a committee with a majority of women, with responsibilities including examining company rules and ensuring women's participation in all activities. The committee is entitled to participate in defining conditions governing job access and promotion and job evaluation, and to be involved in determining working conditions. |
| Sweden | In the 1994 local authorities agreement, equal opportunities is seen as a strategic issue in restructuring local government. Sex segregation and the equal distribution of job opportunities is "an important question in terms of democracy, power and efficiency" and, at managerial level, is regarded as relevant to the quality of decision-making. Equal opportunities are thus mainstreamed as a central operational principle for all the agreement's relevant policy areas. |
| UK | In the London Fire and Civil Defence Service, an equality audit was targeted explicitly at organisational culture. The approach was modelled on the risk assessment principle applied in health and safety audits: identifying the areas of risk, assessing the degree of risk, and taking appropriate action. Implementation involved investigating existing policies and procedures, and patterns and trends in recruitment, selection, retention, promotion, grievance and discipline, training and development, promotion and career development. A workforce opinion survey was undertaken, involving unions. Analysis focused on organisational and cultural change and the management of equality. The audit led to the adoption of an agreement aimed at embedding the programme for equality in a broader programme aimed at widespread cultural change, in partnership with unions. |
Tackling gender gaps
Throughout the EU there is pronounced gender segregation at work. One aspect of this is vertical segregation where, for example, women are less likely to work in managerial posts than men. There is also persistent occupational segregation, with women over-represented among service workers, clerical and sales workers and in the care, nursing and education professions. Other occupations, such as technical workers, production workers and transport workers, are heavily male-dominated. Collective agreements which address the issues of women's access to and progress in jobs and sex segregation in the workforce, focus on three, often overlapping aspects - recruitment, promotion and training.
On recruitment and selection, features of the good agreements analysed in the Foundation research include:
- elimination of sex stereotyping in job descriptions and advertisements;
- opportunities to combine work and caring and to work part time;
- removing or raising age limits and eliminating discriminatory requests for information;
- checking for suitable internal candidates;
- positive action recruitment advertising (encouraging applications from the under-represented sex);
- setting recruitment targets; and
- setting recruitment targets; and
- inviting all female candidates for interview or putting female candidates on shortlists for jobs in which they are under-represented, at least in proportion to the number of women among applicants.
In filling vacancies, the preferential recruitment of women for fields or posts in which they are under-represented appears an effective way of trying to achieve better gender balance. Such positive action is in accord with the Amsterdam Treaty.
Another instrument which can be used to tackle gender segregation is promotion policy. The agreements analysed cover:
- studying the workforce's sex composition;
- identifying obstacles to the promotion of women; and
- mapping career paths to facilitate women' access to higher posts.
Targets for the promotion of women range from achieving an equal balance of the sexes at all hierarchical levels to defining possible proportions in selected departments for selected groups of positions. Measures to achieve the targets include:
- gender-sensitive promotion criteria;
- preferential treatment of women;
- promotional pools;
- encouraging women; and
- incentives for departments to achieve targets.
The research also found that agreements which provide for training can help women progress within organisations and break down gender segregation. Such agreements cover:
- equal or preferential access to training and work experience;
- special training (eg enabling women to acquire "male" skills and for managers and others in equal opportunities awareness);
- training funds and places reserved for women; and
- arrangements for care facilities during training.
The EU has a long tradition of regulating equal pay for women and men. Nevertheless, gender pay gaps persist. This is due partly to labour market segmentation processes, which, for example, encourage women to re-enter the labour market into low paid jobs, and partly to the undervaluing of traditional women's jobs. On average, women still earn 20% less than men. Pay differences exist to differing degrees in all Member States, in both manufacturing and services. However, the pay gap tends to be narrower in countries with strong statutory protection - where there is, for example, a minimum wage and/or centralised wage fixing (eg Sweden, Denmark and France) - than in countries which have traditionally not had such features (eg the UK and Ireland).
It follows that the way in which the gender pay gap is best tackled varies according to the national context. However, pay determination is a central component of collective bargaining, and if an equal opportunities perspective is not incorporated into agreements, gender gaps will be (re)institutionalised by bargaining.
It is important to reveal any invisible discrimination in a collective agreement by looking at the context within which it will be implemented. This context (eg organisational or sectoral) is generally one of labour market segregation by employment forms, combined with sex segregation. Consequently, it is necessary to ask: Who are the workers in the various categories of the agreement? Who is left outside the scope of the agreement (eg employees in flexible and part-time jobs)? Who in practice receives the different benefits negotiated?
More positively formulated, bargaining can help remove discrimination, for example by ensuring transparency, the review of pay structures and the development of gender-neutral job evaluation schemes. The undervaluing of traditional women's work could thus be addressed. Other possibilities are a systematic re-evaluation of work traditionally done by women, and using equality supplements to balance out discriminatory tendencies in the wage-fixing process.
Reconciling work and family life
The ability to combine paid work and family life is important for male and female employees at different stages of life, not only with regard to childcare, but also care for elderly relatives. To improve the possibilities for reconciling work and family life, the Employment Guidelines point to the desirability of "family-friendly" policies such as career breaks, parental leave facilities, possibilities for part-time working, and flexible working time. Opportunities for care time (eg parental leave, care leave or part-time work) in combination with care services (childcare and elderly care facilities) would give employees the possibility to choose an arrangement which fits best with their individual needs or situation.
Provisions relating to the reconciliation of work and family life must be available equally to women and men. Otherwise the traditional unequal distribution of family work would be reinforced and constitute a barrier to equal opportunities in paid employment. Some agreements aim to encourage the take-up of provisions by men - for example, full pay for parental leave.
The research identified many examples of agreements with leave facilities that go beyond the legal minimum standards. Good examples were also found of agreements where the social partners provide for childcare facilities, sometimes in cooperation with national or local government or non-governmental organisations.
Collective agreements also focus on the reintegration of workers into the labour market following a career break. The main areas touched on are:
- training measures during parental leave and in relation to reintegration into employment;
- ways of maintaining contact while on leave; and
- building up seniority and social security rights during periods of leave.
Examples of agreements on these issues are provided in table 2 below.
| Austria | Agreements in the public sector provide for career breaks. There is provision for information on job opportunities, discussion on deployment to other jobs, maintaining contact during leave, and dealing with the resumption of work: support after leave, targeted training and preferential admission to courses. |
| Belgium | An agreement concluded in the National Labour Council provides a right to unpaid leave of up to 10 days per year for urgent reasons: illness, accident or hospitalisation of a person living under the same roof, or a parent or close relation. |
| Denmark | A 1995 agreement in insurance provides for full- or part-time paid leave to care for sick children, and if they require hospitalisation, up to eight days on full pay. Unpaid leave may also be granted. If there is serious illness, full- or part-time leave of up to 13 weeks may be granted on full pay, including holiday entitlement, pension contributions and seniority entitlement. In the case of care for a dying or terminally ill person, leave on full pay is provided. |
| Germany | In the North Rhine-Westphalia retail trade, an agreement gives entitlement to parental leave of one and a half years, with suspended employment, after the legal parental leave of three years. Such leave may be taken part time. The leave can be taken in two blocks, each of at least six months. Where both parents work in the company, the one and a half year entitlement is given only once but can be divided between the parents. Employees are entitled to employment in a similar job after parental leave, without this being set out in a contract clause. |
| Greece | The collective agreement for accountants in private commerce, industry and services provides that employees with children up to the age of 16 may take five days' paid leave per year to monitor their children's school progress and six days unpaid leave for exceptional domestic problems. Either partner may opt to work reduced hours to care for a child. |
| Ireland | The broadcasting authority, in conjunction with unions, created a childcare cooperative - an on-site crèche - in 1987. The employer bears the cost of the building and maintenance. An overall management committee works in conjunction with an operational committee elected by parents whose children attend the crèche. |
| Italy | A 1994 national agreement in finance allows unpaid leave for family, personal or educational reasons of up to one year and unpaid leave to care for gravely ill children. |
| Netherlands | An agreement in medical insurance provides for the employer to invest 0.4% of paybill in childcare provision, in the context of the government subsidising childcare places together with places financed by employers. |
| Spain | In the railway sector, a 1995 agreement provides that the period of parental leave is taken into account in the worker's length of service record; workers taking leave may compete for transfers and promotion as if they were still at work. In retail, a 1995 agreement gives workers taking leave the right to attend training courses, to facilitate their return to work. Childcare absence counts towards length of service. |
| Sweden | A 1995 agreement in insurance provides for a review of employees' salaries after a return to work following full-time parental leave, to address the fact that returners' salaries tended to lag behind those of fellow employees. |
Collective bargaining and mainstreaming equal opportunities
During the 1997 European Council employment summit in Luxembourg (EU9711168F), the mainstreaming approach was strongly supported: equality of opportunity for women and men was to be not only a priority in itself, but an integral dimension of the employability, entrepreneurship and adaptability pillars. Since the Employment Guidelines give social partners a role in improving adaptability and encouraging employability, their involvement in these areas also provides equal opportunities mainstreaming potential.
Below we indicate how collective bargaining can contribute to mainstreaming equal opportunities under the employability and adaptability pillars. However, the mainstreaming concept encompasses more than is indicated in the Employment Guidelines. The fourth Community Action Programme on equal opportunities defines gender mainstreaming as: "the systematic integration of the respective situations, priorities and needs of women and men in all policies with a view to promoting equality between women and men and mobilising all general policies and measures specifically for the purpose of achieving equality by actively and openly taking into account, at the planning stage, their effects on the respective situations of women and men in implementation, monitoring and evaluation."
Obviously there are issues for negotiation of direct relevance to women and to gender equality, such as those discussed above. However, as well as bargaining on these equality issues, equality-aware bargaining is needed on all issues. Using bargaining as a mainstreaming instrument requires the social partners to inject an equality dimension into all bargaining. It will be necessary to examine how agreements affect women and men, and to consider how their implementation and outcomes might be monitored.
The research provided examples where introducing equal opportunities considerations into negotiations was shown not to add costs or dilute adaptability, but rather to improve the image and performance of the organisation or sector. Embracing equality demonstrates modern community- and family-responsible entrepreneurship. This may serve organisational objectives, like increasing the ability to recruit personnel. The research showed how equality-aware bargaining can produce "win-win" outcomes for employers, employees and the wider community.
Employability
Training and education are crucial measures for improving employability. Vulnerable groups in the labour market, such as re-entering women, ethnic minorities, young people and older people, are helped by special schemes which take into account their specific situation. To promote training for employees with care responsibilities, special provisions must be created, such as childcare facilities for women and men while in training, paid education leave or schemes combining training and work.
Adaptability
The concept of adaptability in the Employment Guidelines is focused on the objective of modernising work organisation, by introducing flexible working arrangements - such as the reduction of working time, the development of part-time work, lifelong training and career breaks - and including different contractual forms. The Guidelines stress a balance between flexibility and security.
Improvements in the adaptability of organisations have often happened at the expense of equality and security. Flexible workers, for example part-time and temporary workers, often have lower pay and inferior working conditions to other employees, and enjoy less security. In 1997, some 80% of part-time workers were women, while women accounted for over half of all temporary jobs.
In general, it is important that collective bargaining is directed towards creating good-quality jobs. Furthermore, flexible workers need to be protected by equality agreements and not excluded from the scope of bargaining. Some national studies in the Foundation research underlined the positive influence of minimum standard regulations, in particular a minimum wage. Many agreements seek to promote equality in working conditions for temporary and part-time workers, by introducing hourly wages, care facilities and training opportunities. Other agreements promote part-time work in jobs higher up the occupational hierarchy and improve the quality of part-time and temporary work at lower levels. Recent EU Directives are likely to stimulate further developments of this kind.
Organisations should be challenged and changed so both women and men have equal opportunities. Currently women are often expected to adapt to existing organisational structures and arrangements, shaped by and around men's needs and priorities. An important aspect of modernising work organisation has to be adapting organisations to women. This includes adapting working time to meet women's needs and circumstances. Examples of agreements on this issue are provided in table 3 below.
| Austria | An equal opportunities plan in a federal ministry challenges organisational norms on the balance between professional and family work, emphasising men's responsibilities for family work. It also questions existing working time cultures. Measures on reconciling work and family life include: meetings in core time so part-timers and child carers can attend; work scheduled to be completed in normal hours; taking account of childcare responsibilities if overtime is required; encouraging part-time work; giving part-timers' entitlement to training, and encouraging the acceptability of parental leave for men. |
| France | An agreement in the petroleum products sector provides six different formulae for part-time work linked to the school timetable. |
| Italy | Women have been prime movers in "time in the cities" developments, in which the male-defined organisation of time is challenged and urban time linked to working time. A 1994 agreement signed by the Milan municipal authorities, the prefect's office, the Chamber of Trade and trade unions, tackles the relationship between working time and free time and models the social organisation of time. Working times are now used as an indicator to ascertain the quality of life of male and female workers and their families. These changes are affecting people whose needs are not only different but may be contradictory. It is up to negotiators to identify ways of directing negotiations towards an equitable outcome, taking account of the fact that working time no longer concerns only production processes but also other areas |
| Portugal | An agreement in the Post Office entitles employees with children under the age of 12, and those responsible for disabled family members, to work part time. In banking, employees are entitled to part-time work to care for children under 12. A 1996 agreement in the paper and cardboard industry entitles parents with children under 12 to work on a reduced or flexible timetable. |
Modernising organisations is also directed at adapting organisational cultures to accommodate a diversity of employees. To attract women to higher positions and to technical sectors, a safe and hospitable working environment must be created. Too often, organisational cultures are unfriendly or even hostile to female employees. Sexual harassment and unfair treatment are not isolated phenomena affecting only individual women, as seen in the fact that research indicates that in one year 3% (2 million) of the women in the EU had been subjected to sexual harassment. Health disorders, loss of production and resignation are more likely to occur in this situation, making sexual harassment both an equality and efficiency issue.
In the research, different examples were found of collective agreements with provisions to combat sexual harassment and other kinds of intimidation. Agreements include:
- a clear, contextual definition of sexual harassment;
- detailed provisions on preventative measures;
- a complaints procedure and complaints officer;
- protection and support for harassed employees;
- sanctions for those found guilty of harassment; and
- supportive initiatives such as special training programmes, designed to raise awareness of the issue and to equip those given responsibility for operating the procedures.
Some agreements distinguish between harassment from superiors and from others and regard sexual harassment that takes place in the context of a hierarchical workplace relationship as particularly grave.
Recommendations for the promotion of equality bargaining
The paper ends by identifying some factors which can encourage the use of collective bargaining as an instrument for strengthening and mainstreaming equal opportunities, and offers some suggestions for action. The recommendations for future action are addressed, in the first place, to the social partners and, in the second, to national and supra-national authorities which are in a position to request, stimulate and/or facilitate action by the social partners. The recommendations are as follows.
Social partners (at the appropriate levels) should:
- Improve their expertise on equality issues by establishing equality officers or expertise centres within their organisations at national, sectoral and/or company level.
- Take positive action to ensure women's proper representation within their organisations and to improve women's participation in the bargaining process both in terms of quantity (increasing the number) and quality (increasing women's influence).
- Develop equality guidelines or manuals for their negotiators, to promote equality on the bargaining agenda and to help mainstream equality in all agenda items.
- Provide training to develop equality awareness of negotiators.
- Develop an equal opportunities scan as an instrument for gender-proofing collective agreements.
- Ensure that agreements include provisions for implementation and monitoring of equality measures.
- Set up joint equality bodies on national, sectoral or company level with responsibility for overseeing the implementation and elaboration of equality provisions
- Conclude general framework agreements on equality issues, at European, sectoral and national level, as appropriate, to tackle, for example, the gender pay gap or sexual harassment.
- In order to integrate an equality perspective in all collective bargaining, focus, for example, on the creation of good quality new jobs and on the inclusion of flexible and part-time workers in all collective arrangements.
Action by others:
- National governments should seek to utilise (or establish) mechanisms to disseminate good practice in equality bargaining, for example by stimulating national expertise centres and expert groups and by ensuring that attention is paid to equality in the administrative collection and review of agreements.
- National Action Plans should report at least on quantitative developments on the decrease of the pay gap between the sexes, changes in horizontal and vertical sex segregation and the increase of female negotiators in collective bargaining.
- National governments should develop equality legislation and review how new and existing equality legislation requires action by the social partners, and facilitate and monitor such action.
- National governments should ensure action by the social partners to promote collective bargaining includes an equality dimension.
- The European Union, national Member States and local authorities should reserve funds for equality areas, for example, childcare facilities and care leave facilities, to guarantee equal opportunities for employees and self-employed persons with care responsibilities while they are undergoing training.
- The European Commission's technical and financial support to the social partners could involve funds for the appointment and/or training of equality officers or the creation of joint equality bodies on national, company or sectoral level.
- The European Commission should ensure equality is mainstreamed into legislative measures promoting social dialogue and collective bargaining, such as provisions relating to European Works Councils and the proposed national level consultation and information bodies.
- The European Commission should maintain a database on the results of equality bargaining throughout the EU