Trust and Dialogue in the Danish Model
Background paper by Søren Kaj Andersen
In research to date and the broader debate concerning flexicurity in the Danish labour market, the focus has been on labour market policy, and in particular on how mobility in the labour market has served to secure competitiveness and employment. Attention has been directed towards the relatively free access to 'hire-and-fire', the relatively generous unemployment benefits and the active labour market policy.
The present paper will focus on the collective agreement system. Trust and dialogue are in this paper seen as the crucial points for departure for the development 'flexicurity' in Danish labour market regulation. The argument is that the collective bargaining system has undergone a development in the past two decades that has contributed substantially to increased flexibility in labour market regulation as well as to increased employment security, i.e. flexicurity. This is a result both of the decentralisation of the collective bargaining system with bargaining rights delegated to enterprise level (first and foremost wages and working time arrangements) and also of the broadening of the scope of the collective agreements so that new areas, especially welfare issues (pension, further/supplementary training, maternaty and parental leave, sick pay, etc.), have been included on the bargaining agenda. These two trends in the collective bargaining system have generated new possibilities of creating flexibility along with security in the Danish labour market, i.e. flexicurity.
Further, it is argued that wages and working conditions for temporary agency workers, as one example of atypical workers, today is covered by the collective agreements. In this sense temporary agency workers are covered by 'flexicurity'.
Backgroundpaper for the seminar Flexicurity or Flexploitation? Atypical work in Europe, arranged by the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, 20 September 2007.