Why don’t governments need trade Unions anymore? : the death of social pacts in Ireland and Italy

CULPEPPER, Pepper D.; REGAN, Aidan

doi:10.1093/ser/mwt028

Why don’t governments need trade Unions anymore? : the death of social pacts in Ireland and Italy

dc.contributor.author	CULPEPPER, Pepper D.
dc.contributor.author	REGAN, Aidan
dc.date.accessioned	2014-12-09T14:09:31Z
dc.date.available	2014-12-09T14:09:31Z
dc.date.issued	2014
dc.description	First published online : February 2, 2014
dc.description.abstract	During the 1990s, a prominent strategy of economic adjustment to the challenges of competitiveness and budgetary retrenchment among the non-corporatist countries of Europe was the negotiation of social pacts. Since the onset of the great recession and the Eurozone crisis, social pacts have been conspicuous by their absence. Why have unions not been invited into government buildings to negotiate paths of economic adjustment in the countries hardest hit by the crisis? Drawing on empirical experiences from Ireland and Italy – two cases on which much of the social pact literature concentrated – this article attributes the exclusion of unions to their declining legitimacy. Unions in the new European periphery have lost the capacity either to threaten governments with the stick of protest or to seduce policymakers with the carrot of problem-solving. They are now seen as a narrow interest group like any other.	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.identifier.citation	Socio-Economic Review, 2014, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 723-745	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1093/ser/mwt028
dc.identifier.endpage	745	en
dc.identifier.issue	4	en
dc.identifier.startpage	723	en
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1814/33814
dc.identifier.volume	12	en
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.relation.ispartof	Socio-Economic Review	en
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess	en
dc.title	Why don’t governments need trade Unions anymore? : the death of social pacts in Ireland and Italy	en
dc.type	Article	en
dspace.entity.type	Publication
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