Collective bargaining, deliberation and social dialogue
According to John Dunlop’s system of industrial relation is a tripartite structure, including workers, employers and the State, is engaged in a framework of collective bargaining where the speaking positions reflect opposing, and to a certain extent, irreconcilable viewpoints, and the goal is to reach a compromise where all partners engage in the discussion using the ‘weapons’ at their disposal; in the case of the workers or employees, this is the tool of the withdrawal of labour, or the threat of industrial action.
In contrast, deliberation as a form of discursive practice in Habermasian terms, or ‘civil dialogue’, can be conceptualised as a more open framework, where a consensus can be reached by actors engaged in the dialogue in a non-confrontational form, ‘through exchanges of arguments accepted as valid by the participants in the public debate’.
Social dialogue, defined as the ‘institutionalised consultation procedure involving the European social partners, [or also] the processes between social partners at various levels of industrial relations, seems to sit uneasily between these two extremes, sharing elements of both, and, seemingly, failing to provide any of the benefits of its two more established predecessors. Its openness to deliberative processes is coupled with an integrative thrust to the given of the Single Market project to the exclusion of alternative paths, in a misguided effort to accommodate the ‘social’ to the reality of the market, never the other way around. This logic of commitment, through social dialogue, to a predetermined outcome risks undermining any advantages conferred by the deliberative ethos to the bargaining process.
