From the 1990s onwards, the role of social partners – trade unions and employers’ organizations – in labour market governance has changed profoundly. Their role varies between being strongly involved on the level of decision making and implementation to outright exclusion. In this paper the conditions are explored that lay behind involvement of organized interests in labour market governance arrangements.
In this paper I argue that existing perspectives that account for social partners involvement in policy making and implementation cannot adequately account for the dynamics in social partner involvement in labour market governance. Instead I propose a perspective whereby social partner involvement is analyzed as a particular form of institutionalization. In this paper institutionalization is not conceived as the development of a static structure, but ‘real’ actors adjusting their behavior to each other by making strategic choices.
To understand how strategic choices operate and shape institutional arrangements , I analyze two contrasting cases of labour market governance; Belgium (Flanders) and the Netherlands. Although in both countries social partners were involved in labour market governance in the early 1990s, they followed different reform trajectories in the two consecutive decades. In Belgium the position of social partners remained unchanged while in the Netherlands the social partners got excluded. In the empirical analysis, particular emphasis is put on the current period in which labour markets are in flux. How does the crisis affect the strategic choices made by the core actors involved in the governance of the labour market? What is the difference in actor-strategies between Belgium and the Netherlands with a different involvement of social partners?
