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This chapter outlines the plethora of employee issues with which a liquidator must deal, not the least of which concern unions and labor relations. Retention and compensation of key management and staff to operate the business through liquidation are discussed. Termination of employees, collective bargaining agreements, and retirement, health, and other benefit plans in compliance with applicable regulations such as the WARN Act are addressed.

An analysis of union presence focusing only on union membership can be misleading, particularly so for European countries. Ch. 4 examines wider issues of union presence, including forms of bargaining (centralization and coordination of bargaining) and issues of coverage of collective agreements. Two key questions are addressed. First, what do unions do besides bargain over wages? Second, how do unions make their presence felt beyond mere density statistics (‘excess coverage’)?

According to Traxler (1994), the coverage rate of collective agreements is the most important indicator in determining the degree of organization or disorganization of labour markets. As fewer employees are covered by such agreements, organized industrial relations become more irrelevant. Since the coverage rate represents the ratio of employees covered by a collective agreement to the total number of employees in a firm, multi-level bargaining has to be taken into consideration as double-counting may occur. The chapter investigates the impact of internationalization on coverage through a cross-sectional analysis of the long-term developments along a certain group of countries. The chapter also looks into the stages of an evolutionary erosion of coverage and how this affects the labour market.

The institutionalization of work rules into employment systems arises by their incorporation into job classification systems. The ‘atomistic’ view by which simple tasks are aggregated into job categories is rejected in favour of a ‘holistic’ view, whereby the logic of a classification system shapes the elementary tasks. Job classifications reduce job idiosyncrasy and establish a language by which workers and managers can compare jobs and performance. Job classifications play a key role in enterprise management and in collective agreements.

The diffusion of employment rules is analysed as an evolutionarily stable strategy. The primary mechanism is that once a particular rule begins to dominate in a sector, it makes sense for others to adopt it because it is widely understood by workers and managers. They can therefore spread in the absence of action by the state and collective bargaining—essential if we are to understand employment relations in ‘non‐union’ firms. However, such rules can be further reinforced by incorporation into collective agreements and employment law.

The Netherlands departed from the Bismarckian social insurance tradition by combining flat-rate public basic pensions with quasi-mandatory, funded occupational pensions with near universal coverage. The emergence, expansion, and reorganization of occupational pensions show their close integration with the public pension scheme. Many efforts helped expand and improve coverage through collective agreements by employers and trade unions. Short case studies of pension funds in the public and private sector highlight the core features of the Dutch system as well as its institutional variation. In the wake of the financial crisis, occupational pensions were scaled back since these defined-benefit (DB) pensions were threatened by underfunding. Current debates question the future viability of the Dutch system in an era marked by both demographic ageing and volatile financials.

This chapter examines organizational restructuring in major telecommunications firms or corporate groups, along with their implications for employees working across networked call centers. Telecommunications employers have used restructuring measures such as outsourcing, subsidiary creation, and consolidation of jobs in both the United States and Germany to reduce costs, often with the effect of weakening or avoiding collective agreements. Managers either moved work or sold locations to call center subcontractors with substantially lower union density, few collective agreements, and in Germany, weaker works councils. Using a number of case studies, this chapter compares the strategies adopted by labor unions and works councils at major telecommunications firms toward organizational restructuring, and their effects on management strategy and worker outcomes. It shows that organizational restructuring not only had a disorganizing effect on industrial relations institutions in the telecommunications sector, but also has made it more difficult for unions to establish new institutions across the more decentralized “production networks” used by companies to organize their call center work.

EU law recognizes the regulatory role of social partners—the bodies representing management and labour—but provides neither a legal nor a fully developed conceptual framework. An output analysis of the texts produced by the social partners demonstrates that they fulfil a variety of functions, both as stakeholders and co-regulators. However, only a small percentage of the documents produced in the European social dialogue have the status of EU collective agreements. It is the latter group which is most interesting from the point of view of regulation. A further analysis tracks the different interactions between EU law and EU collective agreements and highlights the tension between horizontal and vertical subsidiarity created by the REFIT agenda.

The weakening of collective bargaining systems has been one of the top priorities within the so-called “new economic governance” at EU level over the past decade. Based on the Stability and Growth Pact and its tightening in the course of the Euro zone crisis, decentralisation and fragmentation of collective bargaining geared to promote labour cost-based competitiveness has become common standard in the “country-specific recommendations” within the “European Semester”. This approach has been pushed forward most vigorously in Southern Europe. Quite surprisingly, however, the outcomes of these attacks differ substantially across countries. The paper describes the different dynamics of collective bargaining systems in Spain, Italy and Greece over recent years and gives some tentative explanations for these differences, pointing primarily at contrasting trade union approaches. Further, the paper addresses the potentials of the state at national and EU levels to act as a stabilizer, rather than a driver of weakening collective bargaining systems. Given the stark contrasts in industrial relations practices across EU countries, it suggests practical steps to be taken towards a turnaround in EU policy approaches to collective bargaining within the framework of the “European Semester”, following the logic of an enabling state aimed at fostering social equity.

This chapter addresses what rights entitlements and obligations are—and are not—inherited by the transferee on a transfer of an undertaking falling within the scope of TUPE. In relation to individual rights, the chapter addresses what is transferred and what is not transferring, focusing on issues such as discretionary entitlement, personal injury claims, restrictive covenants, bonus entitlements, share options, continuity of employment, mobility clauses, collectively agreed terms, and national minimum wage obligations. The transfer of collective agreements and of trade union recognition is also addressed as well as the impact of a TUPE transfer on industrial action.

This chapter begins with a brief outline of the challenges faced by unions in the context of austerity. It then draws on interviews undertaken as part of a research study carried out with UNI Global Union (the Global Union Federation for unions representing workers in private sector service industries) to explore new forms of unionism in the context of advanced austerity and neoliberalism. The chapter analyses three case studies (in each of Romania, the Dominican Republic and the United States) in sectors that have been hostile to unionization and that unions have traditionally found hard to organize. These unions successfully undertook activities including new forms of social movement and community-based unionism that have no immediate or obvious 'pay off', and activity that secured collective bargaining agreements and transformative increases in membership. These activities represent a broadening of union purpose and effective strategies in the face of the growing precarity, fragmented workforces, and globalization of work in the context of austerity.

This chapter reviews Anglo-American labor history to illustrate that the right to refuse unsafe work has been a struggle to decide who is empowered to define it. The right to refuse was protected as early as the Jellico Agreement of 1893, which covered eight Appalachian mines and was at the time “one of the most advanced agreements of any miners in the country.” It allowed a miner “to refuse to work if he thought the mine was dangerous through failure of the bosses to supply enough support timber.” After the enactment of the U.S. National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and adoption of Wagner Act principles in Canada in the 1940s, the right to refuse unsafe work gained ground as a viable subject of collective bargaining in North America. Collective labor agreements would become the only way to circumvent the strict common laws on the termination of employment that had commodified workers in the United States and Canada.

This chapter details the attempts of the union representing Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) employees at Sidhu & Sons to organize, gain certification, and secure a first collective agreement for a bargaining unit encompassing participants in a temporary migrant work program (TMWP) permitting circularity. Through an analysis of the legal proceedings surrounding United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 1518's bid for certification, it explores SAWP employees' two important motivations for organizing: namely, to preempt termination without just cause prompting premature repatriation and to secure mechanisms for recall suitable to workers laboring transnationally. Local 1518, in seeking to represent SAWP employees, came up against tensions arising both from the Labour Relations Board's (LRB) understanding of its role of facilitating access to collective bargaining under the Labour Relations Code (LRC) and from limits posed by the parameters of the TMWP in play. Consequently, the unit obtained certification, but only on a restricted basis. At the same time, it introduced mechanisms aiming to limit termination without just cause prompting premature repatriation and offered novel provisions on recall and seniority.

While Spain has traditionally underperformed compared to its European neighbours in terms of labour productivity, this trend reverses after 2007. Part of the explanation for this reversal is likely to be the direct impact of decreasing labour inputs relative to capital. Using a longitudinal sample of Spanish manufacturing and services companies between 1995 and 2012, this chapter shows that the recent increase in Spanish aggregate productivity is also driven by the behaviour of firm-level total factor productivity (TFP) and by composition effects. By combining firm-level information on balance sheet items, collective agreements, and imports/exports, this chapter documents that firm TFP is positively correlated to firm-specific collective agreements and access to external markets during the whole period. In addition, the estimates indicate that firm TFP was negatively correlated to the proportion of temporary workers during the expansionary period (1995–2007), but positively correlated during the crisis (2008–12).

This chapter analyses the historical development of job security regulations in Western Europe from the late nineteenth century until the years immediately following World War 2. It makes three key contributions: First, it demonstrates the crucial role of trade unions in the expansion of job security regulations. Second, it shows that protection against dismissal was strengthened during critical junctures that temporarily shifted the power balance in favour of the labour movement. Finally, it demonstrates how prevailing state–society relationships and legal traditions allowed some union movements to pursue job security regulations by means of collective agreements rather than legislation. Combined, these factors explain why, by the mid-twentieth century, some countries had introduced far-reaching restrictions of the employers’ right to hire and fire while others had not, and why the level of protection against dismissal in this period is not positively correlated with the commonly used indicators of labour movement strength.

This chapter considers how and when external or additional sources become incorporated into the contract of employment. The focus is on three main sources: collective agreements made through trade unions, company or staff handbooks, and disciplinary and grievance procedures. The chapter presents the standard ‘general’ judicial two-stage approach to incorporation: intention to incorporate or methods of incorporation, and aptness. However, the contribution of the chapter is to observe that judges appear to be applying this general approach differently depending on the source. The argument is that this de facto hierarchy of sources is misplaced. A relaxed approach should similarly be taken to the incorporation of terms from collective agreements or, if anything, the terms of a collective agreement ought to be more easily incorporated than terms from either a company handbook or an employer’s disciplinary procedure.

This chapter examines Sweden’s openness to labour migration from outside the EU (since reforms in 2008), inside the EU (Eastern enlargement), and the impact of EU law on the posting of workers, in particular the Laval case. The chapter argues that strong labour market institutions protecting domestic wage rates and terms and conditions, in particular a high unionization rate and high collective bargaining coverage, has been a precondition for the opening up of the Swedish labour market to labour migration. In this context, the Laval case caused a paroxysm, as it prevented the collectively agreed going rate from being enforced. The chapter emphasizes the difference, from a labour law perspective, between different forms of labour migration, with trade in services related to cross-border labour mobility being viewed as the bigger challenge.

The basics of the employment relationship and the job security hierarchy are explained along with the major elements of contract law. Contracts may or may not include only the "four corners" of a contract letter, but such documents may also include faculty handbooks, memoranda of understanding, promises made during the interview process, past practices, and institutional culture. Prominent cases are examined as they pertain to the security of academic jobs.