Rodriguez Contreras, Ricardo

As part of its mandate to promote dialogue between management and labour, Eurofound has monitored and analysed developments in industrial relations systems at EU level and in EU Member States for over 40 years. This flagship report is based...

The aim of this report is to add to the discussion on how Eurofound can contribute to supporting capacity building of social partners for effective social dialogue. The report includes a review by Eurofound aimed at identifying the capacity...

This study examines the interaction between social dialogue practices and human resources management (HRM) policies in European multinational companies (MNCs). It looks at the changing role of HRM and its interaction with European Works Cou...

This report investigates the quality of the national social partners’ involvement in designing and implementing reforms and policies in the context of the European Semester 2018–2019 and in the elaboration of the National Reform Programmes. As previously reported by Eurofound, there is a positive correlation between the strength of the national social dialogue and the involvement of the social partners in policymaking.

Innovation and technological advancement are natural features of developed economies, and they are necessary to maintain and improve sustainable competitiveness in an era of globalisation. However, while most innovation tends to be incremen...

Trade unions in many EU Member States face the issue of declining membership. This is a fundamental challenge for organised labour, but it is premature to speak about the redundancy unions: when it comes to important decisions affecting the workplace, restructuring being one, trade unions remain a powerful mechanism of employee voice. Latest data from Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) confirms that the presence of a trade union in the workplace is associated with greater employee voice and involvement in decision-making on restructuring.

This report investigates the involvement of the national social partners in the design and implementation of reforms and policies in the context of the European Semester and countryspecific recommendations 2017–2018. In line with previous reports on the same theme, it also analyses the quality of the involvement of the social partners in elaborating the National Reform Programmes.

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 study looks at the articulation and the complex multi-level links between European and national levels of social dialogue. It examines the factors that facilitate as well as those that hinder the successful engagement of national social partners and their ability to promote their own interests effectively.

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.