Regulating for decent work in the public supply chain: Experimentation under contradictory trends

The paper addresses settings of decision-making beyond the familiar world of (labor) market regulation, by examining the various strategies and practices to improve working conditions in companies under public contracts. Next to legal requirements (e.g. pay clauses for publicly contracted firms), important formal and informal norms in this policy field are set outside the core arenas of political regulation and collective self-regulation – in administrative procurement practices, in case law, and also through the emergence and dissemination of professional standards for public procurement. The focus of the paper is on strategies of the public administration and social partners organisations in this broad web of standard-setting processes that shape the competition for public contracts. Since there is a lack of institutionalised channels to voice and negotiate the interests of the different parties in the public supply chain, actors resort to what Murray et al. (2020) have termed “organisational and institutional experimentation”, i.e. they tentatively develop novel forms of work regulation and sometimes then seek to institutionalise this experimentation into new understandings, norms and rules. In the case of public Procurement, this experimentation takes place under contradictory trends: Recent activities at the EU level have more explicitly sought to promote ‘socially responsible public procurement (SRPP) through a ‘soft law’ strategy. Yet these efforts can be at odds with persisting restrictions of competition law, and with financial restrictions and targets for debt reduction – which are likely to regain importance in many European countries as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper draws on expert interviews and case studies from two research projects (one recently finished, one ongoing) that investigate the ‘experimentation’ that takes place in public procurement with a view to safeguard working conditions in public supply chains. The empirical focus of the paper will be on Germany and the UK.