March Divided, Fight United? The cohesion of trade unions and their strength in the negotiations of social pacts (1949-2014)

Which elements affect the strength of trade unions in the negotiations of social pacts with national governments? We argue that trade unions are stronger when they retain more cohesive positions. Indeed, such cohesion is expected to decrease the transaction costs faced by national governments during bargaining processes with trade unions. As a consequence, governments are expected to be more willing to involve cohesive trade unions in policy-making process and to opt for signing social pacts with them. To test this claim, we take advantage of two original datasets. The first one is based on the quantitative content and text analyses of the debates held during the congresses of the two most important Italian trade unions, the left-wing CGIL and the Catholic-inspired CISL. In detail, this analysis will estimates, over time, the degree of cohesion and/or divergence in the policy views of these two labor interest groups. The second dataset codes Italian parliamentary speeches to measure, over time, the government’s propensity to refer to corporatism and to express favorable judgments on trade unions. Statistical analysis will be used to assess whether the cohesion of trade unions affects their strength throughout 65 years of Italian history. After controlling for a number of potentially confounding factors (such as the state of the economy, trade unions’ fragmentation or the number of strikes), our results demonstrate that when the ideological distance between the CGIL and the CISL decreases, the government is more likely to make positive reference to the need of involving trade unions in policy-making process and in economic planning.