BUSINESSEUROPE COMMENTS ON REPORT ON WAGE-SETTING MECHANISMS IN TIMES OF CRISIS

On June 18th 2014, Maxime Cerutti, BUSINESSEUROPE’s Director of Social Affairs commented on the Eurofound report “Changes to wage-setting mechanisms in the context of the crisis and the EU’s new economic governance regime”. He underlined that the decision on how to organise wage bargaining is a national competence and that different industrial relations systems can perform well from a labour market perspective. What is essential for any system is that labour costs are and remain in line with productivity. In this respect, important changes were introduced within some national frameworks to ensure that wage agreements leave more flexibility to the company level to take due account of productivity developments. At the same time, the report illustrates that wage-setting systems have been stable in a majority of Member States in the last years.