Continuing the TUAC Series on the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, Briefing #3 | Implementing the Guidelines to achieve Global Recovery (EN | FR | ESP) examines the level of labour market resilience to global climate, health and economic crises. TUAC finds Capacity and resilience varies widely, depending upon on the level of social dialogue institutionalised. Disruptions arising out of firm-level disagreement are more likely to occur in more fragmented and disorganised bargaining systems, which tend to be tied to lower job quality in the first place, increasing the risk of workers’ dissatisfaction even outside crisis times.
TUAC builds on the OECD report, “Negotiating our way up” published at the end of 2019, which offered a prescient framing of the crises yet to come, introducing collective bargaining as “a key institution to promote rights at work,” connecting collective bargaining and workers’ voice as “unique instruments to reach balanced and tailored solutions to the challenges facing OECD labour markets.” TUAC determines three levels of systemic bargaining resilience based on the reported approaches to collective bargaining and workers’ voice present in OECD labour markets:
• Most resilient: countries with a high level of collective bargaining coverage taking place predominantly at a sectoral or national level;
• Moderately resilient: countries with sectoral and/or company level bargaining and mid-range collective bargaining coverage;
• Least resilient: countries where bargaining takes place at the company level only, with limited capacity for balanced, tailored pathways for a world in transition.