Intervention publique et négociation collective. Le cas de la réduction du temps de travail en Europe

It is often claimed that France stands out from the rest of Europe in social policy, because in France state intervention is more important than collective bargaining; a current example would be the legislation known as the “Aubry laws” on reducing working hours.
Nevertheless, with evidence from a recent seminar organized by the Council for Economic Analysis, Gilbert Cette shows here that even in countries with a strong tradition of collective bargaining (e.g. Germany, the Netherlands), the measures to reduce working hours were introduced after both agreements with trade unions and intervention (sometimes forceful) by the state. Also, in varying degrees, the role of the actors and the procedures have changed, with the social partners not always showing the leadership that is often attributed to them. In Italy, for example, the government rushed to sustain collective bargaining that had stalled, or in the Netherlands it had a key role in launching the negotiations.
The examples of the five countries that Gilbert Cette uses for his study lead him to conclude that “the existence of active bargaining is not a contradiction of state intervention”; on the contrary, he argues, interventions via legislation and regulations actually complement collective bargaining.