Arianna Tassinari, Francesco Massimo
After two decades of low inflation levels and wage moderation, Europe has faced since 2021 an unprecedented increase in cost of living and the risk of stagflation. The inflation shock has eroded employees’ purchasing power, particularly at the bottom of the wage scale. Calls have been made by national and EU-level actors for governments and social partners to manage the current inflation crisis through negotiated incomes policies and collective bargaining. However, the diverse institutional architectures of domestic collective bargaining across the EU might not be equally well equipped to respond to the new challenges posed by an inherently transnational inflation crisis with complex global dynamics. The MAINSOC (Managing the Inflation Crisis through Social Dialogue) project has several aims. First, to analyse the impact of the inflation crisis on real wage dynamics and wage differentials across sectors and groups of workers, and the role of industrial relations institutions to explain differences across countries. Second, to analyse the role of government policies, social partners’ involvement, and industrial relations institutions in managing the inflation crisis, adapting to a new scenario of global inflation, and guaranteeing inclusive growth in six EU countries (DE, DK, ES, IT, HU, PL). As the inflation crisis of 2021-2023 is a transnational phenomenon in its causes and propagation dynamics, a key analytical focus of the project is to understand how have governments, trade unions and employer organisations interpreted and adapted to this new macroeconomic and geopolitical scenario; and to investigate the extent to which dynamics of transnational coordination among actors have emerged - either formally or informally - in orchestrating responses to the inflation crisis, especially for what concerns the strategies of trade unions, their capacity for transnational mobilization at the EU level and their coordination in articulating policy and wage demands across national borders.
European Commission, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. Duration of funding: 2023-2025