The aim of my paper is to highlight that the pluralism of employer interests'' intermediation may be a factor of emergence of neo-corporatism. To achieve this proposition, I rely on the study of CVT funding schemes and governance systems that appeared during the last decades in 15 Western European countries. In Continental Europe, large firms had good reasons (economic and political) to oppose compulsory contributions and bi-partite training funds . Given the power and the hostility of large firms, the intra-associative voice of training SMEs has more strength when there is a SME associative network towards which they can easily defect. More precisely, an additional condition is that this network must be powerful enough to exercise a competitive pressure on the general associative network dominated by large firms. That is why training funds appeared in MMEs (France, Spain, Italy, and Greece) and CMEs (the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Austria) where the SME confederation had the ability at the same time to provide SME services and to represent them in the bi- and tripartite bargaining. Less hegemonic in the general voluntary employer confederation, large firms were less able to prevent the signing of sector-based or inter-sectoral agreements with labour unions establishing a system of CVT compulsory contributions. The logic described above contradicts the traditional literature on neo-corporatism, as well as VoC. Indeed, according to these approaches, a clear relationship exists between strong intermediate unions and employer associations and corporatist governance.
