decision making can be profoundly important, helping to explain why managers
seek the agreement of employee representatives. In effect, local managers and
employee representatives are forced into each other’s arms, helping to account for
the shift in emphasis from distributive bargaining to integrative bargaining.
From compulsory systems to flexible frameworks?A further consequence of the developments taking place has been a shift in
emphasis from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ regulation in terms of output at national as
well as EU levels. As the Supiot Report (1999: 145–6) reminds us, it is not just
that more issues are being decided by collective bargaining, leading to the
tendency to divest laws of substantive rules, which tend to be ‘hard’ in form,
in favour of rules on negotiation, which tend to be ‘soft’. In recent years, so-
called ‘proceduralization’ has been affecting collective bargaining as well –
there has also been a considerable growth in framework agreements.
Typically, the higher the level at which a collective agreement is reached, the
more likely it is to take the form of a framework agreement or accord cadre,
wherein much of the regulation is of the ‘soft’ or incompletevariety. Indeed,
a key rationale of much of the higher-level activity – indeed, it is the very
essence of ‘organized decentralization’ – is to lay the way for more detailed
negotiations at lower levels that can embrace ‘hard’ regulation tailor-made to
the specific circumstances of individual units. Most social pacts between
national social partners take the form of ‘framework’ agreements, as do many
company-level PECs.
Just as the kind of detail involved in the negotiation of PECs cannot be
dealt with at higher levels, so too it is much more difficult to pin down in the
form of ‘hard’ regulation. This would be true, for example, of commitments to
flexibility and continuous improvement or the involvement of employee rep-
resentatives in the organization’s planning for the future. In these and other
cases, delegation of the responsibility for implementation to lower levels, an
issue already discussed above, can also mean that the company-level provisions
are general in definition. A further consequence is greater informality, which
links back to the point about form – collective bargaining begins to look more
like social dialogue than agreement making.
4 CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
Multi-speed ‘Europeanization’?Evidently, the pace at which these developments are taking place within
national systems varies considerably between and within sectors as well as
Industrial Relations in Europe 449