Social Pacts on the Road to EMU:
A Comparison of the Italian and Polish Experiences
Guglielmo Meardi
Abstract
In the new EU member states tripartite, national level social pacts have been
promoted as privileged instrument for a rapid and relatively painless
attainment of the Maastricht criteria, following the example of many old
member states in the 1990s and notably Italy. But such policy advice is not
based on careful comparisons. The paper, by comparing Poland and Italy,
undermines the dominant view that the failure of concertation attempts in
Poland is mostly due to trade union politicisation. The comparative test with
Italy, a country with equally politicised trade unions where, by contrast,
important social pacts have been signed, suggests that divergent employers’
strategies and organisation are at least an equally important factor.
Additionally, it provides a more mixed assessment of the Italian social pacts.
Keywords: corporatism – European Union – Economic and Monetary Union –
trade unions – interest politics
Introduction
In the literature on corporatism, concertation and social pacts in Europe there is a striking
shortage of East-West comparative research (for a rare exception see Jankova and Turner
2004). The extensive production on post-communist countries has tellingly developed a
distinct term (‘tripartism’) and by treating its object as a separate phenomenon from
western European realities often falls into one of the following conceptual mistakes. In
some cases, it assesses ‘tripartism’ using different benchmarks than in western Europe,
that is, it ‘idealises’ western corporatism and, against such an idealised version, it
unavoidably only points at eastern failures and deficiencies. In other cases, it builds on
different, sometimes ad hoc explanatory models that use different variables, often of a
cultural and/or political nature as against the more ‘mature’ institutional, strategic or
economic ones that prevail in accounts of the western phenomenon.
This article focuses on the case of social pacts as a specific historic configuration,
emerged in the 1990s, of macro-level concertation, intended as tripartite (employers,
unions and government) co-ordination of wage regulation and social and economic
policy. The word concertation is used rather than ‘corporatism’, first because of the
negative connotations of the concept in the Italian context, and second in order to include
cases that achieve co-ordination without the structures considered as pre-requisites by
‘classic’ corporatist theory (Traxler 2004).
After a discussion of the nature of social pacts across old and new member states (section
1) and a methodological note (section 2), I will here make the example of how the
supposed ‘failure’ of Polish ‘tripartism’ is often explained through arguments that would
not be well-suited in western Europe, with some serious analytical and normative
drawbacks. It is notably the case of union ‘politicisation’, and it is most visible through
an Italo-Polish comparison. The argument will be presented in sections 3 (presentation of
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the two country’s situation), section 4 (a critique of the dominant explanation) and
section 5 (the presentation of alternative explanations). In the conclusion, lessons for
further research will be drawn.
1. EMU and social pacts, East and West
The creation of a Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the enlargement to eight,
and in the future ten or more, post-communist countries have been the most important
geopolitical changes for interest politics in Europe in the last years. While both changes
have attracted a considerable amount of research, they have been very rarely studied
jointly, forgetting that the new member states have no opt-out alternative and will have to
join the EMU, which is expected for 2007 or little later. This article wants to develop the
intuition by Kittel (2002) according to which EMU and enlargement would have a joint
effect which is greater than the two taken separately.
There is a large consensus on the fact that the introduction of a common currency, and
the related convergence of monetary policies have important effects on interest
representation and industrial relations. However, opinions could hardly be more diverse
on the nature and direction of such effects. Three main alternative hypotheses can be
distinguished. First, the ‘Anglo-Saxonisation’ hypothesis, which underlines the
deregulatory effects of capital mobility, ECB monetarism, and budgetary restrictions
(Boyer 2000). Second, the ‘Europeanisation’ hypothesis, which postulates a
reconstitution, at the European level, of regulations which have been dismantled at the
national one, whether in a functionalist (Schulten 2000), strategic (Traxler 2003;
Ciccarone and Marchetti 2003) or contingent way (Marginson, Sisson and Arrowsmith
2003). Lastly, the possibility, apparently paradoxical, of ‘re-nationalisation’, due to the
renewed suitability of concerted income policies in states which have lost control over
the other tools (monetary, because of the Euro, and fiscal, because of the Growth and
Stability Pact) of macro-economic management (Crouch 1998).
The period between the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the official inauguration of EMU
(1999), during which as many as nine out of twelve future EMU members have engaged
in concertative attempts, soon defined as ‘Social Pacts’ (Pochet and Fajertag 1997; 2000),
had provided robust evidence in favour of the latter hypothesis. Some saw in them the reemergence, within the framework of long-term cycles, of neo-corporatist policies,
illustrated by the image of a ‘corporatist Sisyphus’ (Schmitter and Grote 1997). Others
have however noticed important differences between such social pacts and previous neocorporatist policies (Regini 1997 and 2003; Baccaro 2003; Rhodes 1997). There are also
those who have criticised the new social pacts, on the basis not only of contingent
arguments (e.g., on Italy, Mania and Sateriale 2002), but also of a general argument
according to which re-nationalization of income policies under the Growth and Stability
Pact regime would necessarily lead to, in sequence, a spiral of deflationary wage
restraint, the increase of unemployment, and the weakening of trade unions (Martin
2000). According to such scenario, re-nationalisation, far from constituting an alternative
to Anglo-Saxonisation of European societies, would only be an indirect path towards the
same final outcome: a deregulated labour market with increased inequality. On the other
hand, it has also been argued that given the co-ordination and imitation processes within
the EU, re-nationalisation does not actually exclude Europeanisation, and may actually
proceed alongside it (Dølvik 2000; Marginson and Sisson 2004).
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Such divergent hypotheses and interpretations would require careful examination, but
comparative studies on the argument have declined at the moment when EMU has been
replaced by the enlargement as main topic of political debate. In fact, however, the
enlargement confirms the importance of the issue, since social pacts, often under the label
of ‘social dialogue’, have been strongly promoted by national and European agencies as
privileged instrument for a rapid and relatively painless attainment of the Maastricht
criteria in the new member states. For the first case of social pact on the Euro, in
Slovenia, it has not even been necessary to wait until the official enlargement (EIRO
2004).
On this ground, the comparative study of concertation experiences in the ‘old’ and ‘new’
member states, directly or indirectly related to EMU, appears to be timely for both
applied and theoretical reasons. From the applied point of view, a deeper and more
systematic comprehension of the first wave may provide useful learning material for the
second, at least in order to avoid to be influenced by undue generalisations or
trivialisations of western experiences. From the theoretical point of view, a comparison of
countries with such different points of departure may provide the field for testing general
hypotheses on the necessary conditions and the facilitating factors of neo-corporative
policies, as well as their effects.
2. The approach
A large part of debates on concertation and on different systems of wage determination is
of economic nature, and has often taken as point of departure the well-known theory of a
U relation between centralisation of wage determination and economic performance, first
formulated by Calmfors and Driffill (1988), although implicitly present in the earlier
works of other authors like Tarantelli. The argument by Calmfors and Driffill could be
reformulated for the EMU, suggesting that re-nationalisation through social pacts, as
intermediate level between European centralisation and company-level decentralisation,
would be the worst possible option for member states. Further developments on this path
have detected a number of additional conditions and functional equivalents (Traxler et al.
2001). This perspective, however, focussing only on the effects rather than on the origins,
does not account for the whole complexity of the process. First, the econometric
demonstration of it suffers of the limited number of observations, as clearly visible in
Calmfors and Driffill’s study itself, and has therefore been so far unable to reach valid
conclusions. Treating the EMU as a single observation case would then make
comparative research within it impossible. Second, as it has been accurately argued
(Traxler et al. 2001), the direct causal nexus cannot be with economic performance in
general or with inflation, but only, more specifically, with unit labour costs trends. Using
such latter variable as performance indicator, while very common, is however a
normative choice (it treats as general interest what may be a class-related one), and a
reductive one as it hides the issue of wage dispersion and treats as equivalent low-wage
and high-productivity situations. A similar argument may be raised about the reduction of
social expenditure as an additional parameter of ‘performance’. Finally, even if it were
possible to reach, through comparative research, valid conclusions about the superior
performance of one form of wage regulation, the lesson would be far from clear:
transferability of socio-economic solutions across countries would remain an open issue,
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and it is disputable that national social actors take decisions on the basis of comparative
performance assessments.
This study aims at integrating econometric analyses through an industrial relations
approach based on in-depth case studies. Such choice implies an epistemological silence
on the existence of any national or European ‘general interest’, and a focus on sociopolitical dynamics which may explain the forms of interest representation and, secondly,
concertation. Although industrial relations assume an explicative priority of a structured
antagonism of capital and labour, such approach does not deny that the empirical
manifestations of interests are socially constructed through organisational, political and
cultural practices. The actors are, therefore, at the centre of the analysis. Furthermore, it
has been recently observed that the capital-labour relationship is only one of three
interdependent arenas of exchanges (capital-labour, gender, welfare state) and that
concertation actors take part in all three arenas (O’ Reilly and Spee 1998). As a
consequence, interests may be composite and diverging even within labour or capital, and
there are trade-offs between exchanges in the different arenas, but the understanding of
these phenomena is still very limited. Applied to the topic of social pacts, such a broadly
defined industrial relations approach will focus on the interactions and contamination
between levels and arenas of exchange, and on the changing composition and interests of
the actors, rather than on institutions (Hassel 2003).
The article draws also on the large scientific production of post-communist studies. The
actual working of tripartism has probably been the most studied aspect of central and
eastern European industrial relations (probably because of its institutional relevance and
visibility). Most studies have been critical towards such experiences, defined even as
‘illusory and neo-liberal corporatism’ (Ost 2000). A detached evaluation requires
however such experiences to be compared with ‘really-existing’ corporatism of western
countries rather than with ideal types.
This research has used documentary analysis and interviews, and focussed on the timing
of choices in a comparative perspective. It has studied how the modification of certain
conditions has affected the existence and nature of concertation attempts. The method is
qualitative, with a view of overcoming the problem of a limited number of observations
through a deeper investigation of causal nexuses: it tries to open the ‘black box’ in which
existing structures are transformed in collective identities, organisations and political
choices.
Specifically, the Italo-Polish comparison is based on official Tripartite Commission’s
reports for Poland (MGPiPS 2003), and on secondary literature as well as CNEL (the
institutional equivalent of a Tripartite Commission, although with a rather ‘ornamental’
function only) documentation for Italy. The period considered is 1989-2004. Importantly,
the chronology is integrated by the longitudinal analysis of the social actors, including
interviews with central union officers of CISL and Solidarity, as well as sector level
representatives of CGIL and Solidarity for the metalworking and the banking sectors.
Ongoing research which is being conducted at the company level has also shed light on
the perception and implementation of concertation in the workplaces.
3. Double standards: union politicisation as a virtue in the West, as a vice in the
East? Italy and Poland compared
4
Italy and Poland in 1992-2004 appear to be opposite cases with regard to the evaluation
of corporatist success, but they share the supposed independent variable, that is trade
union politicisation and links to political parties.
On one side, Italy has been often portrayed in the last decade as one of the front-runners
of the upsurge a new form of corporatism (called concertation or ‘social pact’), in spite of
not displaying the traditional preconditions identified by classic corporatist theory and
notably associational monopolies (e.g. Regini 1997, Baccaro 2003). On the other side, the
dominant evaluation of Poland is heart-braking even for the usually poor Central
European standards of façade tripartism: ‘the record of the Polish tripartite negotiations is
clearly the poorest among [Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary]’ (Avdagic 2004a: 7).
From a comparative perspective, the interesting point is that the dominant explanations of
Polish failures (in the media, in political debates and in the scientific literature) focus on
union politicisation as the main impeding factor. In general terms, the focus on union
politics is related to the theoretical classic arguments about the functional distinction
between corporatist and political governance, and the importance of associational
monopoly (Panitsch 1979; Offe 1981). Yet also Italian unions are characterised by
political origins (the so-called ‘Latin’ model) and commitment.1 This point begs the
question: is really union politicisation the main obstacle to concertation?
The Italian case
In Italy the term of corporatism is still connected to the Fascist experience and therefore
not popular. After the war, and until the 1990s, the country has actually been one of the
furthest away from corporatist governance among western industrialised societies
(Crouch 1993). Until the ‘hot autumn’ of 1968-69, trade unions were too weak to aspire
to a political role, and the government was too conservative to involve a union side
dominated by a communist confederation. After 1968-69, some attempts at central-level
bipartite and tripartite regulation were made in 1975-78 and 1983-84, but with very
scarce results. The main political orientation was not conducive to stable concertation:
devaluation in the 1970s, and public deficits in the 1980s. However, in the 1980s some
Italian regions saw the emergence of a sort of ‘micro-corporatism’ that somehow
compensated for the enduring adversarial relations at the national level (Regini 1995).
According to most accounts, the Italian season of macro-level concertation started on the
31st of July 1992, with a tripartite agreement abolishing the wage indexation system
(scala mobile). Such season is generally explained through the deus ex machina of EMU
constraints and the existence of pro-labour governments. This is only partially true for the
1992 agreement, though, which was the final outcome of tripartite negotiations that had
started, on that issue, in 1989. In 1989 the Maastricht criteria had not yet been conceived,
and in 1992 the Maastricht Treaty had not yet been ratified (the French referendum was
pending). At that time, and still for other two years, the actual creation of EMU and the
actual entrance of Italy were very much in doubt: deadlines were being postponed and the
European constraints had not yet entered the political debate. The imperative of ‘entering
Europe’ emerged in the media only in 1994-95. In 1992, Italians were still satisfied to
have ‘entered Europe’ through the single market the year before. Politically, between
1981 and 1993 Italy was ruled by the same centre-left coalition, opposed by the Italian
Communist Party (after 1991 relabelled Democratic Party of the Left, PDS) and by the
main union confederation CGIL. CGIL actually ‘endured’ rather than approved the
5
agreement, and its leader Trentin needed to resign after signing it (the resignation was
however rejected, according to a common Italian custom). What had changed in 1992 and
may explain why an agreement had been finally reached is not union politics or EMU,
but on the one hand the corruption scandals of ‘Bribeville’ shaking the government and,
to an extent, large employers, and on the other the financial crisis that in a few weeks
would have forced Italy out of the ERM. As a matter of fact, in the autumn of the same
year the same government led by Amato introduced a unilateral pension reform that was
fiercely opposed by all trade unions and by the PDS.
The real ‘founding’ agreements of the Italian concertation came the year later, after
Amato had been replaced by Ciampi with a parliamentary majority including the PDS. A
tripartite agreement on the structure and criteria of collective bargaining was signed in
July and another on plant-level union representation in December. Yet the process had
started in 1992: according to the CGIL leader Trentin, the 1993 agreements would have
not been achieved without the one of the pervious year (Trentin 1994). These agreements
are widely considered as having been successful: the inflation rate declined very quickly,
while real wages were broadly defended until 2001, and the subsequent bargaining
rounds were smoother than in the past, with strike levels falling to record lows.
In March 1994, few days before the new right wing party led by Silvio Berlusconi won
the parliamentary elections, the three union confederations and the employer
confederation Confindustria made the unusual public step of sending a formal letter to the
Italian President to ask for guarantees on the respect of the 1993 agreements by the new
government and the maintenance of concertation. Such declaration confirms the weight
given at that time to the concertative instrument, but it did not achieve its goal. Newly
elected Berlusconi did involve the social parties in long consultations during the Summer
of 1994, but then tried to push through a unilateral pension reform that caused the largest
industrial dispute since 1945 and contributed to the fall of the same government in
December.
In 1995, the new Dini government, supported by the Left, managed to accomplish the
pension reform with the support of the unions. The final agreement on the issue was not
signed by the employers and should not therefore considered as a tripartite success.
However, the employers did not openly resist it either, and the decision not to sign it may
be seen as tactical, in the perspective of future reform plans.
It is under the centre-left government by Prodi that the Maastricht constraints become
apparent and dominate the political debate. The EMU is in Italy a shared objective by
most political and social forces and, as a shared objective, allows many issues to become
positive-sum games. The EMU popularity at the time explains why the population, and
the unions, supported in 1996 an exceptional, one-off extra seven points of income tax
(with progressive corrections and the promise of refund) in order to bring the deficit in
line with the Maastricht criteria. In 1998, against the expectation of many, Italy managed
to enter the first group of EMU countries. However, concertation did not lead to
important agreements or reforms in that period, apart from the Pact for Work of 1996 and
an additional pension reform in 1997. In the meantime, the unions tried to defend their
role in the concertation arena against the rising competition by a political party,
Rifondazione Comunista, that tried to take on the representation of labour in the
Parliament. This led to the apparent paradoxes of the unions opposing the government’s
plan of working time reduction because it had been claimed by Rifondazione Comunista
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instead of being agreed through concertation, and to a ritual general strike against the
government in 1998, to which the same government ministers participated.
After a parliamentary reshuffle, the new D’Alema government invested all its influence
to achieve the 1998 ‘Christmas Pact’ on social and regional reforms, which may be seen
as the apex of concertation but also as the beginning of the exit from it, through the
enlargement of the table to many other actors and therefore the watering down of the
same instrument. At the end of the 1990s, concertation was widespread but of little
influence: according to one of the analysis, it was running the risk not only of dying, but
– even worse! - of becoming a ritual (Salvati 2000: 475). Interestingly, this is the time
when Italy had already entered the EMU: it seems therefore that the Maastricht criteria
created demand for social pacts before accession, but not so much later (under the
discipline of the Growth and Stability Pact), arguably because of the reduction of
freedom for national governments.
In 2001, Berlusconi came to power again, and this time he programmatically rejected
concertation, preferring the idea of non-binding ‘social dialogue’. The new government
split the unions and signed an agreement (the ‘Pact for Italy’) with CISL and UIL only in
2002, with the fierce opposition of CGIL in the streets. However, the actors did not
abandon the idea of concertation overall. An agreement was signed by employers’
confederation and all unions, including the CGIL, in June 2003, and the new president of
Confindustria (and Fiat chief executive) Montezemolo elected in May 2004 openly
demanded a return of the government to concertation. Bipartite negotiations started on
the reform of collective bargaining, but were soon abandoned by the CGIL.
The Polish case
Poland is unique in Central Europe in its delay in introducing tripartite bodies, advocated
by ILO and EU, after the fall of communism. The Tripartite Commission was created
only in 1994, after an original corporatist attempt to solve social conflicts related to
privatisation through a ‘Pact for the Enterprise’ the year before, at the initiative of labour
minister Jacek Kuroń, a charismatic former dissident and the main supporter of
corporatism among Polish politicians. The Pact of 1993 came after a wave of strikes in
1992-93, after the ‘shock therapy’ had led to a sharp economic recession with industrial
production falling by about 35%. Before 1992, no need for tripartism was felt in Poland
because the most active trade union, Solidarity, was also the main force in the
government. The union was expected to play the role of ‘protective umbrella’ for the
government, and social negotiation should have occurred within the same government
with no need for an additional body. This interpretation, to which Jankova and Turner
(2004) subscribe, neglects however that Solidarity’s parliamentary arm did not actively
defend labour interests in the 1989-1991 Parliament, and it was very much reduced after
the parliamentary elections of 1991 when it only received 5% of the vote. There is no
evidence of Solidarity political proposals to amend the hard neo-liberal policies of the
government, while the same union, even if still clandestine, had had an enormous impact
in the 1980s, by raising real wages, obtaining pension indexation in 1986, and blocking
the first market-oriented reforms through a referendum in 1987. Only in May 1993 the
parliamentary fraction of Solidarity decided to vote against the government, leading to its
fall, but even in that occasion the majority of its MPs actually voted in favour of the
ruling right-wing coalition.
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Evaluations of the Tripartite Commission after 1994 have been sceptical since the
beginning, similarly to the rest of central-eastern Europe (e.g. Reutter 1996, Mouranche
1996). In January 1995 it reached an important agreement on wages in the public sector,
ending a strike in the health services. Agreements on public sector wages were also
reached in 1996, but no longer since. In 1998 Solidarity refused to negotiate, and in 1999
the other union confederation, OPZZ, abandoned the Commission overall impeding its
further work (at that time, each organisation had basically a veto power within the
Commission). In order to reinvigorate the Commission and to avoid vetoes, a law was
passed in 2001 to regulate its works. In 2002, the new labour minister, and later minister
of economy and labour, Jerzy Hausner, an academic previously known for a neocorporatist orientation (e.g. Hausner 1994; Hausner, Pedersen and Ronit 1994), tried to
lead it to a social pact on reforms, but it was eventually impeded by Solidarity’s
opposition (Gardawski 2004). Eventually, in Summer 2004 Hausner contradicted its own
neocorporatist orientation by proposing without previous consultation a radical reform of
workplace industrial relation including the introduction of works councils. The
paradoxical effect was to instigate bipartite dialogue between employers and unions,
tactically allied against the government proposal.
Evaluations of the Polish case range from very negative (e.g. Ost 2000: ‘illusory
corporatism’) and more positive views depending on how corporatist performance is
measured. ILO-oriented accounts insist that tripartism has been successful in limiting
protest, and indeed strikes in post-communist Poland have constantly declined from a
record-high in 1992-93 to an official (but not reliable) minimum of one strike in 2002,
following the introduction of ‘tripartism’. The causal link between tripartism and strike
behaviour is still to be proved, however, given that low strike propensity seems to
characterise all post-communist societies regardless of corporatism (Bohle and
Greskovits 2004). Jankova and Turner’s (2004) dissenting positive evaluation of Polish
‘social partnership’ (not entirely overlapping with tripartism) has been reached only at the
cost of programmatically writing off outcomes from the analysis and only focussing on
procedures and actor involvement. In this way, however, the success of corporatism
becomes tautological and the issue of façade tripartism is by-passed – as façade and
substance coincide.
The argument on union politics has been formalised in the clearest way by Frieske and
Machol-Zajda (1999: 13): the players (i.e. the unions) are interested in political, not
economic pay-offs; and politically, pay-offs of rupture are always higher than those of
co-operation. The fact that among all three sides of the Tripartite Commission of the time
there were members of Parliament was seen as proof of the fact that the Commission was
an element of the political, not corporatist order. In the Polish case, the difficulty is made
insuperable by the fact that the two main confederations are on the two opposite sides of
the political divide (Solidarity v post-communists, which with much approximation can
be put as a Right-Left divide). In practice, the right-wing orientation of Solidarity would
explain the Commission’s failures under ‘left-wing’ postcommunist governments (19931997 and 2001-to date), while the left-wing loyalty of OPZZ would have explained the
failures under the right-wing government (1997-2001).
Poland is actually not the only country with politically oriented trade unions on two
separate sides of the political spectrum. Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands (which all
have reached some corporatist or social pact successes) are western examples, but we will
8
here focus on Italy, where union politicisation is very evident and, like in Poland, is
rooted in community and social movement traditions, as exemplified by the importance
of horizontal structures.
4. A critical assessment of the political explanation
Three possible interpretations
The theoretical argument of union politics as an obstacle to corporatism, then, works in
Poland but not in Italy. Why? There are three possible explanations of the divergent paths
of the two countries, of which two empirical (maintaining the validity of the theory) and
one theoretical:
- 1st explanation: union politics is fundamentally different in Poland and Italy
- 2nd explanation: against the dominant view, Italian concertation has failed too
- 3rd explanation: the theory of union politics as obstacle to corporatism is wrong or at
least highly reductive.
I will argue that there is some truth in explanations 1 and 2, but more in explanation 3.
The test is based on the chronological analysis of tripartism and concertation in 19892004.
The differences between Polish and Italian union politics
It is customary to treat western and eastern trade unions as worlds apart. I was personally
impressed ed by the opening question of a journalist of the main Polish newspaper
interviewing me after Solidarity’s electoral victory of 1997: ‘what distinguishes Polish
unions from the normal ones, like the Italian?’ (Gazeta Wyborcza, 24 September 1997).
A close comparison with ‘really existing’ western trade unions forces however to revise
some of the perceived distinctions.
The divide between the two main confederations, CISL and CGIL (we exclude as
politically less relevant the third confederation UIL, as we do in Poland for the FZZ) is
less sharp than between Solidarity and OPZZ. On one side, CGIL-CISL-UIL have the
past experience of a common federation in 1973-84, and their grassroots have often
appealed to ‘unity of action’ since 1969. On the other side, Solidarity and OPZZ are kept
apart by the memory of martial law, when some were jailed or fired, and others were
rewarded for their loyalty. If this were not enough, they are also kept apart by an
interminable legal dispute on the division of the former official unions’ possessions.
Yet the concern with politics is not less sharp in Italy. In spite of a visible distinction due
to the incompatibility between union and parliamentary mandate introduced by the
unions themselves in 1969 (which does not exist in Poland, where in 1993-1997 about a
fifth of the parliament were union representatives), Italian union leaders are important
political figures and almost regularly move to senior political roles, like in the case of all
CGIL general secretaries of the last twenty years (Lama, Pizzinato, Trentin and especially
Cofferati, the protagonist of concertation in the 1990s). The CGIL leftist minority is even
more politically engaged (its former leader Bertinotti is since 1994 the secretary of the
Rifondazione Comunista party). The involvement of CGIL in politics was manifest in the
public row between its leader Cofferati and the PDS leader D’Alema on the podium of
the PDS Congress of 1997. After that event, Cofferati published a book of success whose
title (‘Everyone to Their Job’) sounded like an excusatio non petita for his excessively
9
political profile (Cofferati 1997). In a similar way, OPZZ leader Manicki caused some
tumult when he presented, and immediately after withdrew, his candidature to the
presidency of the post-communist SLD party in March 2004. Although CISL is often
portrayed as less politically characterised, the ‘revolving doors’ between union and
politics operate for them in the same way (see the political careers of former leaders
Carniti, Marini, D’Antoni.)
For most of the 1990s both CISL and CGIL have been on the same side of the political
divide, which might be interpreted as a structural difference from the Polish situation. Yet
this is more an exception than their natural position, and cannot therefore be seen as a
cause of corporatist successes. Between 1950 and 1993, with the only exception of 197679, CISL and CGIL’s majority have been on opposing sides (Christian Democrats and
Communists, later Left Democrats), period which also includes the first important
tripartite agreement (Amato 1992). This happened again, in more subtle ways, in 1999-03
after CISL leader D’Antoni started the political adventure of first the Grande CISL and
then (after leaving CISL) the centrist Democrazia Europea party that supported Silvio
Berlusconi’s right-wing government in 2001-04 (before shifting to the centre-left). In that
period, CGIL leader Cofferati even suggested (maybe polemically) that a Polish-like
union political bi-polarism (CISL on the Right, CGIL on the Left) was a realistic scenario
for Italy (L’Espresso, 13th June 2002).
On the other side, the forms of political involvement by the Polish unions are converging
with the Italian practice. After the electoral defeat of Solidarity’s president Krzaklewski
in 2000, Solidarity officially abandoned the political scene, and its situation looks now
more and more similar to the Italian unions’ one. OPZZ too was marginalised within the
post-communist party SLD in 2001 and had to turn to the Tripartite Commission to make
its voice heard. Also, at the company level co-operation between the two unions is
increasingly frequent, with a bottom-up pressure for unity of action that reminds the
Italian situation of 1968-69.
The striking similarity between Italian and Solidarity lies exactly in their political nature
of social movements, including ideology, strong horizontal structures and concern for
broad bargaining agendas (Meardi 2004, 2005). If in Poland the divide between
Solidarity and OPZZ is biographic and cultural, Italian unions too have long been seen as
rooted in distinct, Christian and communist, subcultures (Bedani 1995). Both Italian and
Polish unions tend to represent interests that go beyond formal employment. Solidarity
organised a referendum on popular privatisation in 1996, OPZZ tried to organise the
unemployed, UIL to represent ‘citizens’ instead of workers, CGIL, CISL and UIL
organised immigrants and stood by national unity during the farcical secession of
Northern Italy in 1996.
It is more appropriate to distinguish the degree of political power rather than of
commitment. In this perspective, Advagic (2004b) has shown how unfavourable are
unions’ links to political parties in the East as compared to the West. This stems in part in
the unions’ incapacity to guarantee their constituency’s political loyalty. In 2001, for the
first time, a majority of Solidarity members appear to have voted for the Left (CBOS
2001). Yet in this regard Italian unions are not much different from their Polish
counterparts, as their control capacity is not much stronger and their political divide is not
less sharp. In the 2001 elections, 50% of CISL members and 29% of CGIL members
appear to have voted for the Right (Repubblica, 24 February 2002). Overall, stressing the
10
difference in political power is something radically different from stressing political
involvement as such. Some authors have seen a link between the two, arguing that
Solidarity’s social movement nature has been the cause of its weakness (Ost 2002). But
this is not at all the dominant concern which is omnipresent in Polish media (Kozek
2000) and also recurrent in Polish specialist debates: Polish unions are portrayed as both
too political and too strong, and this is seen as the obstacle to social pacts.
Downgrading the Italian example?
There are more empirical grounds to support the second explanation. If union political
engagement is so important in Italy, then, if we maintain the classic theory, Italian
concertation should actually be seen as a more superficial, politically contingent
phenomenon than usually admitted (at least until 2001). There are arguments in favour of
such an interpretation: concertation has really worked only in periods of pro-labour
governments supported by both CISL and CGIL (1993-1994, 1995-1999). It has been
fragile or unproductive under governments supported (or tolerated) only by CISL (199293 and 2001-02) or only by CGIL (1999-2001), and it has collapsed under anti-labour
governments (1994, 2002-date). It is therefore to an extent dependent on the political
cycle as it seems to be in Poland. Moreover, on some issues Italian corporatism has
displayed its limits. While it has allowed the reform of collective bargaining and an
effective income policy in 1993-2001 (elimination of inflation and overall defence of real
wages), the new system has not worked in the important metalworking sector (where
collective bargaining has been more adversarial than ever before) and it the South of the
country (where company-level bargaining has not taken place).
Yet the differences with Poland are macroscopic too. In a way, the metalworking sector
may be seen as the exception confirming the rule, explained by its specific history, and
the lack of company bargaining in the South may have its labour market reasons. With all
its limits, in a comparative perspective Italian concertation remains a case of point in
western Europe despite its more political unions than elsewhere. The most visible
difference is on pension reforms. In Italy, unilateral reforms have been contested (1992,
2004) and in one case successfully rejected by the unions jointly (1994), while bargained
reform, if gradual, has been successfully introduced (1995, 1997), although without the
formal agreement of the employers. In each case unions were an important and
essentially unitary actor despite of the deep political differences. In Poland, a much more
radical, near ‘Chilean’ reform was introduced in 1998 in a completely unilateral way,
with nearly no contestation from the unions (Guadiancich 2003). Actually, at no stage
after 1989 one can detect a distinct union contribution to the path of socio-economic
reforms in Poland.2
It is therefore not a functional explanation that might account for the divergent outcome
of concertation attempts in the two countries. In spite of the different level of economic
development, the issues on the table were similar (unemployment, inflation, pension
reform), while the EMU constraints do not explain the difference: they affected Italy in a
direct way in 1996-98, while the peak of concertation took place in 1992-95.
Theoretical revision
A way out of the puzzle may come from a more careful examination of the Polish path,
together with a revision of the theory (explanation 3). The political cycle does explain
11
union opposition in pre-election periods (Solidarity opposition in 1997 and again in 2001,
OPZZ opposition in 1999-2001). It does not explain the structural failure of the Tripartite
Commission and the not unusual common standpoints between the two unions. Notably,
it does not explain Solidarity’s opposition in 1998, when the government was right-wing.
Moreover, an in-depth investigation into the actors’ views (Gąciarz and Pańków 2001)
reveals that the negative view of OPZZ in 1998-2001 was shared by most Solidarity
unionists, although formally Solidarity did not abandon the Tripartite Commission
(which was not necessary because at the time the veto of one union was sufficient to
prevent agreements). In the grassroots, Solidarity members were even more critical of the
right-wing government than their OPZZ counterparts (CBOS 2001).
An interesting, exceptional period to be considered is 1995-96, when the Chair of the
Commission and Minister of Labour Bączkowski was uniquely ‘bipartisan’: he came
from Solidarity but was a member of a post-communist government, and therefore
enjoyed at least the respect of both unions. Today actors’ accounts portray the period of
1995-96 as a successful exception in the history of the Tripartite Commission. Yet if one
looks at the actual production of the Commission, this seems rather an ex-post, possibly
emotional (Bączkowski’s presidency was interrupted by his sudden death in young age)
idealisation. The parties did meet and talk more than in other periods, but no major
decisions were taken, and the wage agreement of summer 1996 was reached as a
temporary truce in a situation which made even the liberal Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper
speak of ‘class war’. Avdagic (2004a) confirms that the political cycle does not account
for variation in tripartist practices in Central Europe.
5. An alternative explanatory framework
I suggest looking for other more rigorous explanations of the divergent path of Italy and
Poland, and therefore for variables that distinguish, rather than associate, the two
countries. In particular, these are intra-organisational co-ordination, power balance
among actors, and encompassingness.
Vertical co-ordination
Recent works by Traxler (1995, 2001, 2004) have underlined how vertical, intraorganisational co-ordination is at least as important as horizontal, inter-organisational
one. While the unions are equally pluralistic in Poland and Italy, the vertical coordination capacity of both unions and employers’ associations differs sharply. In Italy,
unions have been able to grant workers’ agreement to the pacts signed centrally, and both
sides have on the whole implemented wage agreements at all levels. In Poland, the
national-level wage agreements (when they are signed) remain completely irrelevant for
the actual developments at company level, the only real bargaining level in the country
(Urbaniak 1999). A number of interviews at different levels have shown that at the sector
level the Commission’s recommendation for maximum wage increases are seen as
completely irrelevant, while at the company level they are either unknown, or interpreted
in different ways. In companies were they enjoy real bargaining leverage, unions use the
recommendations as a starting point for a ‘minimum’ increase, on the top of which they
make their demands. This is exactly the opposite of what the recommendations are meant
to be.
12
As Traxler (2004) has argued, multiemployer collective bargaining is a ‘threshold’
required for the development of social pacts. In this regard, Poland is particularly weak
(Kloc 2003). Yet, as Italy has shown in several occasions, the collective bargaining
structure is not immutable. If this is the real obstacle to concertation, social and political
actors may take action, for instance elaborating some forms of incentives or of erga
omnes extension procedures. By contrast, according to Traxler, centralization (and
therefore union political unity) is not that important because of the implementation
problems it raises. In culturally divided societies like Poland and Italy, union divisions
may be more a resource than a hindrance, as within one confederation the minority would
have too many reasons not to comply with the leadership’s wishes.
Relative power
Corporatism has historically been a favoured strategy only after periods of labour
activation and of excessive wage growth, and participation in it makes sense only for
actors with an actual influence on the outcome. When governments and/or employers are
strong enough to implement unilateral decisions there is not much need for it. On the
other side, there are no real incentives to sign an agreement for organisations that have no
veto power or real influence on the outcome: they would pay a political and consent price
without actual rewards. In Italy, the unique situation in which concertazione emerged in
1992-93 was characterised (much more than by the often mentioned EMU constraints,
that were not yet so present in the internal debate), by the sudden calamity of corruption
scandals affecting both government and employers. As the only mass organisations on
the whole unaffected by this calamity, the unions became the only availably support for
political decisions. It is the (relative) weakness of the actors to have created the demand
for concertation (Salvati 2000). At the end of 1998 government weakness and need for
extraparliamentary support through a social pact occurred again: the D’Alema
government was not born through democratic elections but only through the defection of
some right-wing MPs, which explains the effort made to reach the ‘Christmas Pact’, the
swan song of Italian concertation. In 2001, it is the government and the employers’ (with
the new president of Confindustria D’Amato, expression of the SMEs and close to
Berlusconi) to have changed their attitude to concertation, not the unions.
On the other side, it is no wonder that the Tripartite Commission was introduced in
Poland after the strike waves of 1992-93, but employers and the governments were soon
very strong again after the elections of 1993 and the economic recovery associated with
enduring high unemployment. Unlike in Hungary and Czech Republic, real wages have
stagnated in Poland in the last decade, also because of unemployment close to 20%. The
Polish Private Employers’ Confederation’s view of social dialogue is ‘dialogue is better
than strikes’ (Gąciarz and Pańków 2001). The point then is, as long as there are no strikes
in Poland, there is no need for dialogue. The same is valid for the government, as shown
by its capacity to push through (although not to implement successfully) unilateral radical
reforms in 1998 (Kolarska-Bobińska 2000).
Degree of ‘encompassingness’
Corporatism is an effective strategy only when representation is encompassing enough to
avoid major sectoral distortions and externalities. Polish unions are less encompassing
than the Italian ones not so much because of the lower density rate (around 18% as
13
against 34%) but because of its distribution, concentrated on state sector and heavy
industry. In the meanwhile, it is the exposed sector (where unions are very weak) where
there is more concern with wage moderation. Paradoxically, union segregated nature
according to craft, industry, gender or age may increase willingness to engage in
corporatism (because of the need of political legitimacy), but decreases its effectiveness
and viability.
In this regard, however, a common problem in Italy and Poland is the male-dominated
nature of tripartite bodies. In Poland, in 2001-2003 out of 42 representatives of employers
and unions, only four have been women, and the only woman in the nine-person
Presidium was the Private Employers’ Confederation’s president Henryka Bochniarz. In
Italy, there was some outrage when no woman at all sat at the table of the tripartite
negotiations of the first National Action Plan for the European Employment Strategy in
1998. Italian unions, in spite of increased ‘political correctness’, seem to have actually
reduced their interest in gender equality with the increase in labour market differentiation
(Beccalli and Meardi 2002). A similar problem occurs in terms of age, with the overrepresentation of elderly workers or even retired people (the majority of CGIL members)
which has led to the effective defence of already retired workers but the underrepresentation of young workers rights in the case of pension reform in both countries.
Conclusion
To conclude, avoiding the short-cut of explaining corporatist failure through the political
commitment of the unions prevents political and theoretical drawbacks.
Politically, the dominant explanation is tantamount to ask the unions not to be themselves
(voluntaristic requirement) and to give up some of the few resources they still have
(political influence, loyalty, horizontal roots), whereas corporatism would actually benefit
from stronger and more politically-responsible unions. What is rather needed is a
reinforcement of unions at the sector level and of their implementation capacity, for
instance, on the Italian example, through democratic practices of referenda.
Theoretically, it would mean ignoring the deep changes in corporatist practice which
make some of the classic preconditions obsolete. Interestingly enough, the need for
theoretical change is confirmed, symmetrically, by the fact that the clear distinction
between unions and politics in other countries seems to have become more of a problem
than of a resource for corporatist agreements. Streeck (2003), drawing on Lehmbruch
(1999), has explained the German failure to reach a social pact through the importance of
parliamentary compromise in the Bundesrat, to which the unions are external and
therefore, redundant. Also, Germany has one of the most segregated union scene, which
according to our framework is a primary limit to effective concertation.
In terms of research developments, the analysis suggests that more interest should be paid
to the other actors (governments and employers), whose orientations and capacities, in
both Italy and Poland, have been more effective predictors of concertation practice than
the ever-blamed unions. The three factors identified as most important in the new
generation of concertation, i.e. vertical co-ordination, class power balance and
encompassingness, all need more comparative research and tests too. The increased
pressure for social pacts on the eve of EMU enlargement may well offer a higher number
of observations for this purpose. Matched, theoretically grounded contextualised
comparisons may be of use for both ‘East’ and ‘West’: in this case, by dismantling easy,
14
common-sense explanations of the eastern failure, and by highlighting some overlooked
weaknesses in the western case.
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1
Broadly speaking, CGIL has communist-socialist origins, CISL Christian-Democratic, UIL socialdemocratic.
2
With the possible exception of the union of nurses on the health reform in 1998 and 2002 – interestingly
enough, however, a non-affiliated trade union.
17