The changing union and bargaining landscape: union concentration and collective bargaining trends

Unions in Western Europe have tended to merge in larger organisations, straddling across traditional bargaining demarcations. Despite the trend towards union concentration, cross‐national differences remain in the degree of fragmentation and the balance across private and public sectors. In the past years, wage moderation was common to nearly all bargaining systems, partly as a result of coordinated incomes policies or pattern‐setting wage settlements. Tripartite concertation has proven more difficult because of increased dissatisfaction with modest pay increases and insufficient employment effects.