Employee Representation Regimes in Europe: Do They Exist in Practice and Have They Changed in the Crisis?

Forms of employee representation have been legally institutionalised in most of the EU countries. These ER regimes have also been recently framed in European directives. However, there exists a great variety of institutional ER structures among the Member States: union-based or works council type; single or dual channel, complementary or exclusionary. Institutional differences exist also in the powers assigned to the ER, in particular whether the ER has not only consultation, but also co-determination rights (see for example DE). A next dimension of diversity is the role these bodies play in collective bargaining. In many systems they play only an additional role in relation to supra-company bargainng, in other countries they have a key role.

Recently theoretical classifications have been constructed to cluster these different institutional regimes. We can refer to the general typologies of Visser (2009) and Bryson et al. (2012) of IR-regimes. More specific has been the typology of Altmeyer (2005), which is also applied by Van den Berg et al. (2013).  Management style, type of body, assigned powers, bargaining role are used to develop a 5-type model. However, this clustering has never been empirically tested. The paper will in a first step do this empirical test by conducting a cluster analyses on the relevant European Company Survey data of 2010. In a second step and for a country selection, the paper would compare these results with the ECS data from 2005 and investigate the effect of the crisis on the typology.

Concretely the paper would tackle the following questions:

1. A confirmatory analysis of the Altmeyer model of ER in Europe: are the country clusters statistically to distinguish?
2. Which type of companies show a different pattern in the country typology?
3. Has there been an evolution in the regime types since the start of the crisis?