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The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the development of industrial relations (IR) in Spain since the democratic transition and analyses the current dilemmas of its social and political actors in the context of the long-lasting economic downturn.

Combining a political economy, identifying Spain as a particular variety of modern capitalism, and actor-centred historical institutionalism approach, outlining the formation and strategies of the main social actors, the paper draws on the broad range of research on IR in Spain and its theoretical debates, including proper research in the field.

The legacies of the latecomer industrialisation and the semi-peripheral development model still shape the Spanish economy and IR. The impact of the current economic and political-institutional crisis affects the entire institutional IR system and its actors shifting power towards the individual employer thus weakening trade unions, labour rights and collective bargaining. Regarding the theoretical debate on corporatism, the Spanish case provides ambiguous results. The lack of a coherent institutional system and efficient political administration limits the effectiveness of corporatist arrangements and reduces them to contingent concertation strategies. Spain confirms that IR still largely depend on the specific national variety of capitalism that condition economic development and resources for political exchange.

The paper presents an original, theoretical-informed reconstruction of the Spanish IR and allows an understanding of the current institutional transformations and strategic dilemmas in the light of historical legacies. Additionally, the theoretical debates on neo-corporatism and semi-peripheral development are enriched through its application to the Spanish case.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the restructuring approach followed by the highly profitable Telefónica in its 2011 redundancy plan, and explores unions’ response to management strategy.

The research follows a case study approach constructing a dataset with information from company reports, committee records, union documents, press releases, and other available sources such as specialized journals and newspapers.

Specifically this case study tries to show how massive job cuts have been implemented through a labour-mediated downsizing strategy that mitigates contestation and industrial conflict.

The paper tackles the relevant question of how unions respond to corporate restructuring (involving downsizing) in countries where industrial relations institutions remain relatively strongly embedded and proactive.

This paper aims to study the development of new forms of management systems such as quality management in the context of the Spanish public administration.

It reviews the main literature on the topic and relevant policy texts.

The organisation of work within the private sector has undergone important transformations compared with the model of industrial worker that existed in the mid‐twentieth century. In the public sector, these changes have been less noticeable, at least within the Spanish context. Yet, it has undergone and is still undergoing important changes as far as its economic and social standing, targets and procedures are concerned. Organisational adjustment to such changes has been limited, especially in the area of work organisation.

It is a general overview of key developments.

It is relevant for a discussion of the general trends and dynamic of public sector industrial relations in Spain.

It manages to take an overview of changes in the public sector and point to the uncertain development of a new market approach.

The paper will argue that despite the extreme disorganisation and ‘crisis’ of Spanish industrial relations, trade unions have responded by developing a broader political approach ‐ at times almost assuming the “task” of the political party ‐ and using flexible “arms‐length” relations with the state. This in turn has further consequences for the development of a “decentralised” industrial relations system in Spain. Thus recent theorisations of disorganised capitalism such as Lash and Urry's will be debated in the context of the Spanish experience.

This study aims to analyse the institutional changes in the Spanish labour market in the light of the measures introduced to support workers during the COVID-19 crisis. Applying the theoretical framework the authors’ hypothesis is that the labour policy response to the crisis provoked by COVID-19 in Spain has ranged from strategy of preservation of the social democratic coalition to the anti-bourgeois bloc coalition with a greater presence of social pacts and the support of the social partners.

Combining the institutional theory of liberalisation trajectories, the four ideal-typical reform strategies and the social pacts literature, the authors analyse the change in the labour market policy orientation during the COVID-19 economic crisis in Spain.

In comparison to the Great Recession labour policy response, short-time work schemes and new benefits have characterised the 2020 labour policy strategy. Then, the labour policy response has oscillated between, on the one hand, a strategy of preservation of the social democratic coalition, which is characterised by measures to protect workers on the margins of the labour market without affecting the discretionary power of employers. On the other hand, a strategy of the anti-bourgeois bloc coalition, reflected in the employment safeguard clause that attempts to limit both external numerical flexibility and the increase in unemployment. Finally, the authors have analysed whether the labour policies after the COVID-19 crisis constitute a new round of social pacts in Spain and how this took place. They conclude that the main measures approved in the area of employment protection have been supported by social pacts and the social partners (trade unions and employers), as reflected in the signing of the Social Agreement in Defence of Employment (ASDE).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is a significant contribution as it is the first article to point out that the labour policy represents a change in the trajectory of liberalisation, limiting the discretionary power of employers and re-regulating the labour market. The main measure of (re)regulation has been to safeguard employment and to avoid objective or unfair dismissals, which is the traditional form of adjustment. In other words, internal numerical flexibility has been promoted over external flexibility, thus significantly modifying the orientation of labour policy. Finally, the authors have found that social pacts have allowed for greater institutional coherence between legal changes and the behaviour of employers and workers.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between the culture in one of the majority national trade unions in Spain and the difficulties in accomplishing the desired changes and innovations.

A total of 15 focus groups comprised of trade union leaders were conducted. Transcriptions of the groups were analyzed from a grounded theory approach

The presence of an “inconclusive dialectic” structure (thesis‐antithesis‐no synthesis) in the leaders' rhetoric was identified. From a dialectic perspective of organizational change, this can be interpreted as a factor slowing change within the organization.

The study reflects the role played by organizational culture in maintaining this inertia and in the delay of the reduction of divergence between internal and external dimensions implied in the working and survival of trade union organizations. The results of the study reflect the need to introduce changes in the trade union's language and to redefine some of the terms in the discourse. New standards for the evaluation of the efficiency of trade unions as a whole, teams and their members are also necessary. This redefinition implies proposals able to synthesize tensions between the ideological and instrumental and between activism and professionalism.

In order to face workers' demands in the current framework of labor relations, there is general consensus on the need for change and development in trade union organizations. There are numerous factors involved that have been analyzed and some initiatives have been implemented from different levels with unclear success. Although literature on organizational development gives culture a central role, in the case of trade unions this dimension has been neglected.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that: in a context of global labour market competition and in the absence of new strategic repertoires, class trade unions are progressively becoming “managers of precariousness”. Thus, the paper challenges the compromise logic as the unique solution to corporate threats to relocation, since it undermines trade union power resources, mainly discursively and organisationally, and hinders trade union capacity to transform the balance of forces to their favour later, when the hegemonic discourse can more easily be challenged in periods of crisis.

The paper draws upon the doctoral fieldwork the author undertook in the city and province of Barcelona during Spring–Summer 2015. More than 30 semi-structured interviews to various union delegates and regional metal officials have been accompanied by an exhaustive review of primary and secondary documentation. In so doing, this paper gives a rich and nuanced account on the different “world-views” and strategies that union delegates pursue when bargaining against transnational corporations.

This paper shows how the conservative position that Spanish trade unions adopted to the 2008 financial crisis in the automotive industry is path-dependent to dynamics established during the 1990s when lean production techniques were implemented in exchange for higher salaries. It draws upon the collective bargaining history of the Nissan–Zona–Franca assembly factory in the outskirts of Barcelona to, crucially, explain how signing micro-corporatist pacts and portraying them as the unique solution to corporate threats to relocation undermines trade union power resources, and has two important drawbacks: that micro-corporatist pacts only postpone the recurring threat to relocation to the future by eroding, not improving, the conditions of the workforce, accepting corporate discourse erodes the solidarity among workers, and it also allows yellow unions to displace class unions.

This paper enriches and updates the literature on micro-corporatism, collective bargaining in transnational corporations, and the erosion of trade union power resources which dates back to the 1990s and early 2000s. Whilst the negative aspects that competitiveness pacts have on workers’ salaries and conditions have been widely reported, this paper provides a rich and updated explanation of how such pacts have negative repercussions on the discursive and organisational power resources that unions have at the workplace level. In that sense, the originality of this paper rests on engaging into a substantiated historical analysis on how trade unions change throughout time as a result, at least partially, of their own strategic choices. Moreover, this paper clearly shows that concessionary positions towards collective bargaining are self-undermining.

This article compares workers' resistance in foreign direct investments (FDIs) in the automotive and electronics sectors in two special economic zones (SEZs) in the north-east and south-west of Poland. It aims to investigate why, despite the shared characteristics of the SEZs, that there are different outcomes in terms of the balance of formal resistance through trade unions and informal resistance through sabotage.

A spatial framework of analysis is posited to examine how global capital, national employment frameworks and regional institutions play out in local labour markets and shape workers' sense of place and their capacity for workplace resistance. The research study is based on interviews with trade union officials and non-union employees in four foreign investment firms in Poland.

The findings point to the importance of the type of production in influencing the structural power of organised labour and the social agency workers influenced by their understanding of place.

Analysing workplace resistance and industrial relations from a spatial perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to study how employee representatives in European Works Councils (EWCs) treat confidential information and how such strategies might improve the EWC functioning.

Building on interviews of several case studies of EWCs, this paper brings together insights from industrial relations and occupational psychology literature.

The results show that through actively challenging the management, an EWC can reduce the amount of information labelled as confidential and become freer to communicate with their rank and file. Actively challenging management, however, does not seem to impact the openness of the management to give early and complete information.

The paper is based on several case studies, which limits the generalisability of the findings. The results, however, indicate that research is required on how challenging confidentiality can incite managements to provide earlier information.

The research show clearly the potential but also limitations for employee representatives in actively challenging the management over what information is confidential.

This study studies a universally difficult topic for employee representatives: how to handle confidential information. The findings show that EWCs have little levers to force management to provide early information. For this, more structural change is needed.

This study is the first to focus exclusively on the issue of confidentiality in EWCs. This is a central concern for employee representatives, but research, until now, has not given much insight in which strategies work.