Can Social Partners Improve the Quality of Work in Low-Wage Work in Europe?

As the quality of work in new and growing jobs in many sectors in Europe is problematic (Holman, 2013), the question is how and to what extent social partners (and stakeholders in the wider sense) can improve it. This question was central to all the countries and sectors covered by the walqing research, in order to understand how job quality can be improved and whether or not stakeholders’ strategies succeed in changing the situation, especially in services (see Kirov, 2011a and reports in the walqing website). In the context of the low-wage sectors investigated, it is very often difficult to negotiate better salaries as there are limits on wage negotiations due to weak interest representation and union power, market pressures on employers, and interactions between wage bargaining and statutory minimum wages (i.e. in countries where the level of the minimum wages is higher, the bargaining power of trade unions is more limited; see Lehndorff, Chapter 7). However, there are some areas of improvement. The empirical findings from our research suggest that important questions for employees are the stabilisation of employment, working time and working time arrangements, and the development of sustainable perspectives in their occupations (see Kirov, 2011a; Recio et al., Chapter 12; Hohnen et al., Chapter 11). for this reason, the focus in this chapter is on the role of industrial relations in improving these important dimensions of the quality of work.