Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformations in European Industrial Relations

Based on a book coauthored with Chris Howell (“Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation”, Cambridge University Press, 2017), this presentation will document the liberalization that has characterized industrial relations since the late 1970s. The presentation will combine quantitative evidence for 15 OECD countries with in-depth case studies of Germany, Italy, France, Sweden, and the UK. In the presentation, particular attention will be devoted to the German case. It will be argued that both coordinated and liberal market economies have undergone liberalization, but the mechanisms and the specific trajectories have differed depending on which country one focusses on. Industrial relations liberalization, it will be concluded, has undermined wage-led growth and facilitated the emergence of unstable alternative growth models.

Prof. Dr. Lucio Baccaro is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and professor of macro-sociology at the University of Geneva. He is currently working on the political economy of growth models. In addition to the traditional focus on cross-country differences in "supply-side institutions" (wage bargaining institutions, vocational training, social protection systems, etc.), his research aims at systematically incorporating both the level and composition of aggregate demand and income distribution into the analysis.

Moderated by Dr. Tine Hanrieder, WZB

The lecture is part of the WZB lecture series “Great Crisis of Capitalism – A Second Great Transformation?”