Social and Civic Dialogue: Confronting The Challenges Of The Post-Neoliberal Economy

This paper will show that social dialogue establishes a balance of bargaining power in the employment relationship. Globalization has changed the labor markets and contributed to a decline in union membership in a number of countries. It seems that the expansion of global production and the increasing mobility of capital has caused a shift of bargaining power in favor of employers. Growing inequality globally and within a number of companies and the growth of insecurity among those excluded from social dialogue are the empirical expression. In this situation, social dialogue remains a mechanism to protect workers and ensure stable labor relations for employers. Several countries have been able to use it to find ways out of the recent financial crisis: they were able to preserve jobs and to facilitate adjustment of companies.

The analysis of social dialogue in the world realized in this paper will reveal new aspects of social dialogue closer to civic dialogue. If we concede that the current democracy can not be limited to the distribution of resources, but should also include a discussion of the means of production, the dominant idea is that the business world can not be separated from society and that it must therefore participate in the discussion on the objectives of the economic world. The increasing flexibility of the labor market requires what A. Sen and Hirschman called the capability to express oneself so that workers and capital owners together may introduce new thinking about the business world. If social Europe becomes a reality, a new model of prosperity must be built with ideas and actors from civil society. To do this, the organizations of employers and workers and the states should create new initiatives and adapt new strategies to meet the challenges of the 21st century.