Section: Work and Equal Opportunities

The UNI Europa project “Shaping Industrial Relations in a Digitalising Services Industry - Challenges and Opportunities for Social Partners“, in cooperation with “ZSI – Zentrum für Soziale Innovation” and promoted by the European Commission, aims to identify and analyse change factors and explore new approaches for social partners on the challenges of maintaining effective industrial relations systems in a digitalising services industry. The project strives to provide policy advice for trade unions, social partners and policymakers on necessary adaptations of institutional frameworks for industrial relations, collective bargaining, social dialogue and capacity building for social partners. Challenges and opportunities are identified and analysed in particular with regard to workers’ representation at company level and collective bargaining as well as the work and organisation of trade unions in general.

This report updates the insights of the comprehensive literature review conducted for UNI Europa by one of the authors (Holtgrewe, 2015), gathers the insights of the regional reports (Gasparri & Tassinari, 2017; Haider, Holtgrewe, Ramioul, Salamon, & Vereycken, 2018; Ilsøe, 2017; Kirov, 2017; Sharma, 2017) and the results of the series of interviews with union experts with regard to the changes of service markets and policy initiatives with regard to digitalisation.
Union experts and two experts from the employer side were interviewed remotely, on the phone or using conference software using a guideline covering the subjects of the three reports. Interviews were taped with the agreement of participants and summarised in writing. They were then coded and analysed. The transcripts are the source of quotations here. For interviews conducted in German or Spanish, all translations were made by the authors. A warm thank you goes to all participants.

Authors: Holtgrewe, U., Haider, W., Šalamon, N.

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• Project: Shaping Industrial Relations in a Digitalising Services Industry

Tags: digitalisation, labour market, workplace innovation