EU sources -Collective bargaining and minimum wages -December 03, 2015

In a Global Labour Column, Maarten van Klaveren (former editor of this Newsletter) discusses minimum wages and collective bargaining in Asia and Europe. He notes the polarity of debates on the establishment of a statutory minimum wage; on one hand around ‘social justice’ arguments for a minimum wage floor to reduce income inequality and poverty level wages, and on the other, the ‘economic imperative’ to ensure a minimum wage does not depress demand in certain labour markets. In the EU, the 2012 recommendations from the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs foreshadowed an assault on collective bargaining, in order to achieve ‘an overall reduction in the wage-setting power of trade unions’. This should be resisted not only for reasons of redistributive social justice but also to restore forms of wage-led economic growth that will enable the disastrous hold of austerity and financialisation to be broken.

English: http://column.global-labour-university.org/2015/11/minimum-wages-collective …      

For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.

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