representative employers’ organizations willing to negotiate is regarded as the
dominant factor, the sector social dialogue has hardly taken off (see, for example,
Keller and Sörries, 1998).
Arguably more significant are the initiatives of the ETUC and its industry
affiliates aimed at developing co-operation and co-ordination across European
borders to combat the intensified regime competition that the creation of the
Euro-zone is expected to encourage. At its June 1999 Congress in Helsinki the
ETUC adopted a resolution on the ‘Europeanization of industrial relations’
stressing the need ‘for the European trade union movement to act swiftly to
put in place instruments and procedures to promote co-ordination of collective
bargaining now that the Euro-zone is a reality’. At the sector level, deemed to
be ‘essential in collective bargaining co-ordination’, the ETUC’s industry feder-
ations are ‘to create the requisite structures and instruments, adapted to the
needs of the sector concerned’. At the inter-sector level, the ETUC will be ‘com-
petent for overall co-ordination, providing the necessary framework to guar-
antee the overall coherence of the process’ (Fajertag and Pochet, 2000: 11–13).
To this end an ETUC committee for collective bargaining, comprising repre-
sentatives of national affiliates and the European industry-level federations,
has subsequently drawn up a system for benchmarking settlements concluded
by unions across the European Economic Area (EEA) according to a range of
reference points (EIRO, 2001).
Initiatives have also been launched by several of the European industry
trade union federations, including those for metalworking and financial ser-
vices, aimed at developing forms of cross-border co-operation and co-ordination
of collective bargaining. The initiative of the European Metalworkers Federation
(EMF), which dates back to 1993 and thus provided a template for the ETUC,
has gone furthest (Gollbach and Schulten, 2000). The EMF has elaborated com-
mon bargaining guidelines for negotiators in its affiliates, in the form of its
Working Time Charter which specifies a target of 1,680 annual hours and an
annual overtime ceiling and a bargaining co-ordination rule for pay negotia-
tions which, as adopted at its 1999 Congress, stipulates that increases should be
consistent with increases in the cost of living plus a ‘balanced share in produc-
tivity gains’. In tandem, EMF has established a comprehensive electronic data-
base of collective bargaining information, aimed at both diffusing information
across affiliates and monitoring outcomes of negotiations. The EMF initiative
embraces another by IG-Metall to establish regional bargaining co-operation
networks with its partner unions in neighbouring countries and regions to each
of its bargaining districts. In the banking part of the finance sector, through
Uni-Europa, trade unions across the EEA aspire to establish a similar process of
bargaining co-operation and co-ordination. Uni-Europa’s initiative, which is in
its infancy, aims to draw up European-level recommendations, which can be
incorporated in the bargaining agenda in national negotiations, and to establish
a mechanism for the systematic exchange of bargaining information with the
intention of facilitating a benchmarking process across borders.
Industrial Relations in Europe 443