How Can Trade Unions Improve Quality of Work in Low-Wage Services in Europe?

In 2010 the European Union adopted the Europe 2020 strategy, emphasising the need for increasing labour market participation with more and better jobs as essential elements of Europe’s socioeconomic model. But there is evidence that quality of work in many of the low-waged sectors in Europe is still problematic (Holman 2012) and problematic configurations produce various forms of precariousness, low-wage work, problems of social inclusion and violence at work (Kalleberg 2009). Increasingly, employment at the lower end of the spectrum of skills and wages in Europe is dominated by services that are spatially distributed and often employ vulnerable groups of employees (e.g. contract catering, office cleaning, waste collection, etc.). In these sectors, work is often outsourced from the public sector or other private sector companies and taken over by private sector service providers (large service multinationals or SMEs). The outcomes for employees often are insecure and problematic working conditions and little representation. This results from companies’ cost-cutting strategies, enhanced by changing regulations, the practices of contract awarding and public procurement, the role of the client, conditions that are likely to be exacerbated by austerity measures in the framework of the current crisis, etc. The continuous debate about the specifics of service work has brought significant evidence about the importance of the triangular relations between management, employees and customers (Korczynski 2009). The paper investigates how trade unions address those challenges at EU level and in selected European countries. It is based on the recent research done in the framework of a European comparative project WALQING (www.walqing.eu). The findings presented in the paper are mainly results of the analysis of interviews with social partner representatives in those sectors as well as from company case studies carried out in the examined countries.