In-person conference
Ensuring that all workers receive a fair wage that provides for a decent standard of living is a priority for policy-makers in the European Union. Since its inception, the EU has aimed to foster upward economic convergence and social cohesion within and between its Member States. In past decades, significant progress has been made towards these goals, raising the living standards of millions of EU citizens while keeping income inequality at lower levels than in other parts of the world. Despite this progress, income inequality is on the rise in Europe and convergence has stalled since the outbreak of the financial and economic crisis in 2008. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has had severe economic and social consequences, with a reduction in incomes and uneven impacts across the population and between countries. The pandemic further highlighted that many frontline workers are in fact working in sectors, organisations, and occupations offering poor working conditions and low wages, which in turn explains the persistent labour shortages that some of those are faced with.
In the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, EU policy-makers have recognised the key role that social dialogue has played at the national and EU levels in maintaining employment, reducing inequalities, building resilience, mitigating the impacts of the crisis and supporting a sustainable recovery. The EU Council Recommendation and Communication of January 2023 on strengthening both the national and EU level social dialogue are a key case in point. Moreover, the directive on adequate minimum wages, adopted in October 2022, not only aims to increase the coverage of minimum wages and to contribute to upward convergence, but it also promotes collective bargaining and social dialogue. The issue of bargaining for fair wages and lower inequality is thus again high on the EU policy agenda.
Against this background, the main ambition of the BFORE1 – Bargaining for Equality – project, is to identify and analyse collective bargaining processes and practices that help tackle income inequality and ensure fair wages for all workers. To this end, the project first examined the interplay between minimum wage regimes, wage structures, collective bargaining systems and inequality, accounting for recent developments, policy and social partner initiatives. Second, BFORE investigated what kind of agreements are settled, and the impact of bargaining practices, strategies, and structures on workers’ incomes, highlighting the interrelation between sector- and company-level wage bargaining and paying attention to workers in the low-wage segment. Third, the project pinpointed challenges and gaps, and proposed an agenda for strengthening collective bargaining systems across Europe. BFORE has a comparative and a transnational scope, examining EU-level, national-level and sectoral-level dynamics in all EU Member States, Norway and the UK.
This final conference of the BFORE project aims to disseminate the research findings, share country experiences and best practices and engage in a debate about key challenges and what policy-makers and social partners can do to address them.
More information on the project and all deliverables can be found here:
https://hiva.kuleuven.be/sites/bfore
