Labor Relations Commons^™

More Of The Same: Wages And Collective Bargaining Still Under Pressure, Torsten Müller, Stefan Clauwaert, Isabelle Schömann, Kurt Vandaele

Kurt Vandaele

Even as the danger of deflation looms large, the strategy of internal devaluation continues to dominate EU crisis management. In the field of wages and collective bargaining this strategy entails constant pressure on wages and the relentless pursuit of further ‘structural reforms’ aimed primarily at increasing the downward flexibility of wages. This strategy is applied, what is more, not to the ‘crisis countries’ alone but also to the rest of Europe in the context of the country-specific recommendations adopted in the framework of the European Semester (Schulten and Müller 2015). This chapter sets out to achieve 2 aims, the first …