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Drawing on case studies in the German metal and chemical sectors, this article addresses trade unions’ behavior toward employers’ labor market segmentation strategies and, in particular, their use of outsourcing. Findings illustrate that, contrary to the expectations of the dualization literature, trade unions do not always give priority to their core constituency over the interests of temporary or peripheral workers. Union actions are not solely determined by the aim of defending the interests of their current members but depend instead on the interrelationship between unions’ identity and their members’ and organizational interests.

Work externalisation has challenged the ability of industrial unions to represent workers along the value chain and sustain solidaristic policies, leading to the growing fragmentation of wages and working conditions. This article aims to complement institutionalist analyses of unions’ strategies towards peripheral workers by pointing at the role of the labour process. The authors argue that variations in the bargaining strategies and their outcomes for different types of peripheral workers can be explained by observing the extent to which the use of different external work arrangements for specific tasks challenges the logic of industrial unionism. The findings rely on a structured comparison of unions’ responses to the use of agency work and on-site subcontracting in four plants owned by two multinational companies in Italy and Germany.

This contribution focuses on the transformations that took place since the 1990s in the organization of the production processes in the meat-processing industry in the province of Modena (Italy) and on the effects of these transformations on working conditions and on the capacity for workers’ collective action in this sector. The article shows how the companies in the sector have increasingly outsourced large segments of the production process, generally to cooperative enterprises in which workers of foreign origin are employed. These new organizational structures allow a significant reduction of labour costs, and guarantee contracting companies a greater flexibility. At the same time, the fragmentation of production processes led to an increasing segmentation of working conditions between direct and contracted workers, and to the growth of low-paid and vulnerable jobs in subcontracting companies, particularly through the diffusion of phenomena of normative avoidance, strengthened by the normative interventions of the State. These processes also made the development of solidarity between different groups of workers, the exercise of forms of collective action, and the action of trade unions more difficult, even though new representation strategies and new actors are emerging for representing vulnerable workers. The article is based upon 26 in-depth interviews, realized in 5 companies between 2015 and 2018.

PurposeThe paper examines the different trajectories of externalisation and the development of different kinds of welfare mix in three different sub-sectors of socio-educational services: long-term care for the elderly, early childhood services and kindergartens. By integrating the industrial relations and comparative public administration literatures, it analyses the different rationales underpinning contracting-out decisions of Italian local governments.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a multi-method, multi-level approach: quantitative data on the provision of socio-educational services and the nature of the providers are combined with the analysis of 12 case studies of municipalities through 80 semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis.FindingsThe paper argues that differentials in labour regulation across the public/private divide and the consequent possibility to access labour markets characterised by cheaper labour and higher organisational flexibility are a key explanation in local governments' decisions to outsource. Despite labour market factors playing a prominent role, their relevance is significantly tempered by political and social factors and particularly by the strong opposition of citizens, personnel and trade unions to pure market solutions in the provision of such services. However, the centrality of these factors depends on the nature of the services: political sensibility against privatisation proved to be stronger in kindergartens, while services for the elderly were more frequently and less contentiously privatised.Originality/valueThe main contribution is the integration of the two research traditions to analyse patterns of outsourcing in the socio-educational services in Italy, showing that neither of them is able, alone, to explain the different private/public mix characterising different social and educational services.

Over the last decades, the provision of social services by local governments has been characterised by the involvement of private actors through processes such as procurement or accreditation. The literature on welfare systems has widely analyzed the various welfare mix configurations in different countries and explored the effects of these structures in terms of service quality and economic efficiency. Rarely, however, the way in which these processes have impacted on the conditions of workers employed in social services has been examined. This article wants to explore the relationship between vertical disintegration processes and working conditions, highlighting the role of public procurement in influencing the terms of employment in the private segment of the social services sector. In particular, we will show that the growing reliance on market mechanisms for the provision of social services has given rise to a labour market characterized by low wages and worse employment conditions, strong employment and income insecurity, reduced professional support, and a significant incidence of free work. We will show that these features characterising employment in private providers of social services are closely linked to the criteria and mechanisms through which local authorities acquire services. First, we will highlight how access to a less regulated and more flexible labor market is one of the main reasons for explaining the externalisation of service provision. Secondly, we will show that the pressures for cost containment and higher flexibility exercised by local governments in procurement processes reduce the autonomy of private service providers in managing their workers and are often passed down to the workers. Hence, we will argue that much of the responsibility for the poor working conditions experienced by workers in the private segment of the social services sector lies in the characteristics of public procurement and in the contracting conditions under which private providers operate.

One of the most significant developments in corporate organisation over the last three decades has been a tendency to vertical disintegration through outsourcing and subcontracting. This has given rise to complex inter-organisational relationships for the production of goods and services which often extend over the boundaries of national countries, and which have been variously named interorganisational networks, global value chains, and global production networks. These structures are characterised by asymmetric power relationships between firms located at different levels of the value chain. The literature has analysed the consequences of such processes of reorganisation for traditional models of trade union representation. Indeed, they have weakened workers possibility to exercise their voice, especially at lower levels of the value chain, because of scarce trade union presence and lower bargaining power. Moreover, the presence of strong power asymmetries between firms reduces the effectiveness of traditional trade union strategies focused on collective bargaining with the employer: given the economic pressures that chain leaders exercise on their subcontractors, employers itself get less and less autonomous the lower the company is positioned in the value chain. Furthermore, while the power on the employment relationship transcends organizational boundaries, workers have no channels to exercise their voice beyond firm boundaries. In recent years, trade unions have become more aware of the need to engage with the «real employer» at the top of any contracting chain in order to improve working conditions at lower levels and have started experimenting with new strategies. This paper will discuss these issues through a case study analysis of two recent campaigns organised by the German metalworkers union, IG Metall, to represent and improve the working conditions of agency workers and workers employed by subcontractors in German automotive companies.

A cornerstone of industrial relations theory is the idea that the potential for conflict is inherent in the employment relationship. Across countries, forms of workplace conflict and methods of conflict resolution take a range of different forms. Yet aside from attempts to understand cross-national variation in strikes, little research has examined systemic differences in the manifestation and management of workplace conflict. The authors seek to fill this void by analyzing through a comparative lens practices for addressing employment-related conflict in four countries: Germany, the United States, Italy, and Australia. In contrast to the unidimensional varieties of capitalism approach, they analyze workplace conflict resolution systems across two dimensions: collective-individual and regulated-voluntarist. The analysis also emphasizes the importance of within-country variation and interactions between different conflict resolution subsystems.

Under what conditions can unions successfully regulate precarious employment? We compare the divergent trajectories of collective bargaining on agency work in the Italian and German metal sectors from the late 1990s. We explain the differences by the interaction between trade unions' institutional and associational power resources, mediated by employers' divide-and-rule strategies and by union strategies to (re)build a unitary front. In both countries, the liberalization of agency work allowed employers to exploit labour divides, undermining unions' associational power and preventing labour from negotiating effectively. However, while Italian unions remained 'trapped' in the vicious circle between weak legislation and fragmented labour, German unions were able to overcome their internal divides. The different degree of success depended on the nature of the divides within the labour movements.

The Ebola virus has caused substantial illness in West Africa during the past 2 years. In this report, potential differences in the burden of illness between male and female persons are investigated. To the Editor: From December 2013 to August 11, 2015, a total of 20,035 confirmed and probable cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) were reported in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. There have been concerns that the different cultural roles or physiology of male and female persons may have resulted in the sexes being differently affected during this outbreak. 1 , 2 Data on confirmed, probable, and suspected EVD cases (according to World Health Organization [WHO] case definitions 3 ) were collected with the use of a standard case-investigation form 4 in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. This form is completed when a . . .