Conference Agenda

Introduction

The outbreak of the pandemic has caused a tremendous shock on national socio-economic structures around the world. The suspension of production and the use of telework have put workers, who were asked to adjust quickly to ongoing changes, at the center of the debate. Albeit in a difficult context, an unprecedented opportunity of intervention has opened for social actors, despite the outcome of this process is still unclear today.

Research questions

The aims of the article are to:

i) Understand how national social partners across Europe have framed their interests vis-à-vis their core constituencies to strengthen their role and legitimacy.

ii) Identify which new topics have emerged in the public discourse concerning social regulation and employment relations.

iii) Assess whether socio-institutional differences across European countries are reflected in specific models of social dialogue during the pandemic.

Methodology

The methodology is quite innovative since, for the first time in the literature, the newsletters published by social actors at national and European level represent the main source. In fact, a qualitative and quantitative analysis based on text mining is performed on around 2000 newsletters published between 2020 and 2022. Building on the notion of social partners as key actors in policymaking (Streek, 1992), the paper proposes to interpret country-level findings within the theoretical framework of the welfare regime classification (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Ferrera, 1996; Adascalitei, 2012).

Contributions to the literature

Through the construction of an up-to-date database and the implementation of quantitative techniques, the contribution of the paper is threefold. First, we add novel and original information to explore the impact of the pandemic on the employment policies adopted in EU countries; second, we explore the context and frequency of new topics in the social actors’ agenda, such as care jobs, work-life balance, childcare services, protection of vulnerable workers, and income support schemes. Third, we test if the observed heterogeneity in the social discourse is consistent with the welfare regime classification.

Findings

The analysis shows both patterns of convergence and divergences across countries. From the one hand, topics such as short-time work schemes and measures for non-standard workers are frequently discussed in all the EU countries. On the other hand, the relative importance of issues related to work-life balance and care is highly different across welfare regimes. Moreover, the existence of different power resources endowment of social actors emerges clearly from the texts, particularly concerning their direct involvement in policy making.

Kenya faced turbulent times during the Covid -19 pandemic, a situation worsened by floods, locust invasion and drought. The pandemic illuminated the low coverage of social protection programs in the country. Kenya's tripartite partners namely Ministry of labour and social Protection (MOLSP), Central Organization of Trade Unions in Kenya, COTU (K), and Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to guide labour relations during Covid-19 Period. The MOU was registered under Kenya Gazette no 4246 in support of workers and employers under the labour Relations Act of 2007.

The MOU assisted tripartite partners in mitigating the cost of living and alleviating economic insecurity in Kenya, especially among workers during the tabulent times. The MOU supported organizational solidarity to ease the transition, particularly for the displaced workforce. Proposals in the MOU included skills development and redeployment. Further, the extension of social protection to vulnerable groups such as workers who lost their jobs and social security and support systems for transition into green and digital jobs.

This study's objective was to determine the contribution of the tripartite partners' response to the Covid-19 pandemic toward decent work and universal social protection. Research questions applied included finding out how the responses addressed inequalities at the workplace and responses to changing labour market conditions.

The study applied a mixed method approach while research methods comprised desk analysis and Key Informant Interviews to collect data. Data analysis software SPSS was used in the study to analyze qualitative and quantitative data. Descriptive data analysis was applied while hypotheses were tested through multiple and simple regressions and correlations among the study's variables.

The findings indicate that COVID -19 overhauled labour market systems, and the tripartite partners worked together to increase social protection coverage, lower taxes and promote occupational safety to protect workers and employers. Essential service workers were prioritized through integrated responses. Further, the study findings indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic insecurities and destroyed workers' support systems.

The study recommends increasing solidarity-based responses to escalate social protection coverage, wage protection, and promotion of decent work. The tripartite partners need to develop policies to protect frontline workers and sustainable programs to promote decent work even in the post Covid-19 recovery period. The study highlights the new policy development processes such as MOU. The study contributes to the body of knowledge on tripartism and new information on increasing social protection in times of uncertainty.

In recent years, subcontracting and the technological replacement of work highlights the necessity to look toward models of trade unionism that alleviates increasing precarity. This paper asks how demographic shifts and state institutions impact industrial unionism, which has been suggested as a solution for precarious work and automation. More specifically, I consider the ways in which transit unions, which have traditionally been militant archetypes of industrial unionism, have evolved over time. I do this through a comparative historical analysis of the Transit Workers’ Union Local-100 in New York and the Seoul Transit Labor Union in Seoul. The United States and South Korea are unlikely comparisons at first blush but share surprisingly similar characteristics regarding labor politics. The two countries have similar trade union density levels that have declined over time, from 15%-10% over the last 50 years (ILO 2020). Additionally, unlike many countries in Europe (Doellgast et al. 2018) and parts of Asia, such as Japan, Taiwan (Lee 2011), and India (Agarwala 2013), established American and Korean trade unions, including those in the public sector, tend to turn to collective bargaining in the workplace rather than to labor law reform to secure workplace-related rights, such as wages and benefits. The divergence between the two cases is that Seoul transit workers have been much more active in their attempts to build an industrial union movement that embraces sector-level policy changes rather than resorting to a model of craft unionism, as has been the case in New York. I make two arguments. First, the dispositions of transit workers in New York and Seoul related to the different changing needs of infrastructural development in the two cities. In New York, deindustrialization and demographic shifts thwarted the vision of industrial unionism when ethno-racial conflicts in the city and disinvestment in infrastructure weakened the labor movement. In Seoul, infrastructural needs were growing, and an absence of ethno-racial conflicts made room for class (and gender) -based solidarity. Second, the style of labor control, through legal and institutional practices in New York compared to physical repression in Seoul, worked favorably for transit workers in Seoul who found more solidarity with urban residents compared to New York.

By now, it has been relatively actively discussed what the inclusive labor markets are and why we need them. Yet, it is still unclear how to build them. Regarding the process of the reform, we can consider whether social dialogue, i.e. a corporatist way of interest intermediation can be effective. Social dialogues and social pacts were actively pursued and discussed during the recent decades, especially from the era when the world stepped into neo-liberalization since the 1980s. However, as they started to turn around towards post-neo-liberalization since the late 2000s, social dialgoues and social pacts have been rarely observable. Instead, the role of the state has been more strongly emphasized and considered to be almost a sole effective means. It seems that a new era of unilateralism or etatism has come. Then, what is the proper ways and means to cope with the necessary reforms towards inclusive labor markets? Is there no room for a corporatist way of policy-making in this context? South Korea is a proper country to test these questions. In 2016-2017, the revolutionary uprising of the mass in the name of the Candle Light demonstration had been followed by the impeachment of the President, Park Keun Hye. After that, the new center-left administration launched and pursued to strengthen inclusiveness in the labor markets such as rapid increases of the minimum wage and massive changes of the non-standard employment into a standard style, etc. As extension of such politics, the government also projected new initiatives to reform the social dialogue body by actively incorporating the KCTU, the relatively radical confederation of labor unions, which has rigidly taken distance to social dialogues for about two decades. However, such attempts could not achieve the ideal goal. Despite the ambitious strengthening of the tripartite social dialogue body, the KCTU failed to officially join in it. Its initiative to conclude grand-scaled social pacts in the middle of the pandemic was not realized either because the tentative form of the pact failed to be officially recognized inside the confederation, which led the leadership of the KCTU to resign. Such experiences contain meaningful sources for understanding the dilemmas and restraints of corporatist style of policy-making when countries attempt to strengthen the inclusiveness of labor markets. This paper analyses and discusses it.