Welz, Christian

The European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work last year documented the case of a Dutch temporary work agency that hired workers of various nationalities to work for a construction company in Belgium. The wages were suspiciously low, and the Belgian Labour Inspectorate believed that EU law guaranteeing such workers minimum rates of pay was being breached. Inspectors monitored and visited the company over several years, but it was only when they collaborated with the Dutch authorities that both were able to gather the necessary evidence and take steps to resolve the situation.

Previous Eurofound research has identified four key dimensions of industrial relations: industrial democracy, industrial competitiveness, social justice, and quality of work and employment. This report seeks to build a set of indicators to measure country performance in industrial relations in terms of these four dimensions and to develop a typology of industrial relations systems, enabling a cross-country analysis of trends.

The workings of industrial relations are constantly evolving. In this blog piece, Eurofound authors Christian Welz and Ricardo Rodriguez Contreras discuss a tool that Eurofound has developed to enable this process of change to be monitored and analysed, enabling stakeholders in Member States to assess the functioning of industrial relations within their country and to compare it with others.

Eurofound’s 2016 report Mapping key dimensions of industrial relations identified four key dimensions of industrial relations: industrial democracy, industrial competitiveness, social justice, and quality of work and employment. This report builds upon that earlier study, developing a dashboard of 45 indicators to assess how and to what extent the conceptual framework of these key dimensions can be applied at national level.

The representativeness of social partners provides legitimacy for their various roles in industrial relations, whether through the vehicle of social dialogue, collective bargaining or involvement in government policymaking or implementation. This report compares the different ways in which the representativeness of social partners is defined at national, European and international levels.

This report maps, analyses and discusses key dimensions and indicators for a comparative framework of industrial relations. It then identifies and assesses existing data sources that can be used to measure the different dimensions of the comparative framework.

This topical update on the protection of whistle-blowers in the EU mainly covers developments that have taken place in the years 2013–2016. The update covers international, European and national level legislation, and includes two case studies on the protection for whistle-blowers in Ireland and Slovakia.

This report explores the involvement of peak social partners in the European Semester at EU and national level during the period 2011 to 2014. While their role in the European Semester is not set out in the European economic governance provisions (the so-called ‘Six-Pack’), the European institutional bodies view the two sides of industry as being key to the development of the Semester, and have called for their closer involvement.

This article synopsises the development of European social dialogue and then discusses some ideas that might guide the European institutions and the social partners as social dialogue within in the EU is relaunched, such as more autonomy for the social partners, better links between EU and national level, and greater involvement of the social partners in the European Semester.

The new European Commission (EC) under President Jean-Claude Juncker is committed to re-launching social dialogue and a first step was taken with the organisation of a high-level conference in Brussels on 5 March. The aim of the conference was to discuss concrete ways to strengthen social dialogue with EU cross-industry social partners and their national affiliates. On 21 and 22 April 2015 Ministers for Employment and Social Affairs in Riga again discussed informally ways towards a true and responsible social dialogue.  Juan Menéndez-Valdés, Eurofound Director, presented an overview of Eurofound’s recent research work, outlining steps towards a true and responsible social dialogue in Europe.