Comment on articles 49-50-51-52

In the field of the legal systems governing industrial relations, comparative analysis has gained a solid and qualified tradition of internationally renowned studies fostered by the economic and political requirements arising from market globalization and the tendency towards the internationalization of rights and standards to guarantee labour rights. Under the explicit or implicit pressure of delocalization practices, national systems have been subjected to serious tensions that can overturn delicate balances maintained over decades. Today, international organizations, and especially Community institutions, play a highly important role in the transformation of the employment and social systems adopted in every country. This happens directly, through the national implementation of laws issued by the European Community, and indirectly, thanks to the increasingly influential role of comparative statistics and emulation based on mutual knowledge and learning. Today, the influence of supranational legislation and court decisions appears above all in the form of a slow but advancing de-nationalization of labour law, coupled with the creation of a European social model shared almost by all EU countries. With regard to industrial relations, on the other hand, national legal frameworks prove to be much more impermeable and resistant to convergence towards relatively standardized institutional frameworks and practices. The value of comparative legal studies consists in correlating the descriptive analysis of the models with the legal analysis of rules, and seeking to establish how these models should be through their potential transferability. However, this operation requires more and more equilibrium since it is objectively liable to exploitation by parties who believe that, from their own particular point of view, they can take certain aspects selectively in order to support legislative policies that have a specific political value. Significant “morphological” differences remain between the European countries regarding the institutional profiles of industrial relations and the organizational and cultural backgrounds of their major protagonists. Comparative studies on industrial relations have long discerned the contrast between two schools of thought: that of the convergence between models emphasizing what is discretionally regarded to be the most advanced model – i.e. the so-called American “normalism” of the pluralists in the English-speaking countries (1950s-1960s), in addition to the Rhine model (1970s-1980s) – and the school of divergence emphasizing that the institutional and cultural specificities of each model count a lot in defining their trajectories. However, a synthesis of these two positions has now been formed by the theory of “converging divergences”, which is aimed to define how institutional frameworks and practices that differ widely on the national level tend to converge in the area of policies and responses. In other words, this theory provides substantially common responses to the global challenges of our time. In recent years, moreover, the challenges raised by post-Fordism, global competition and the economic crisis are basically global and common to all. This combination of factors has led to serious difficulties of trade union movements all over the world, as can be seen from the more or less generalized fall in the membership in almost all the economically more important countries.