In the Netherlands, industrial relations are traditionally regulated by employers’ associations and trade unions in collective bargaining. Due to the freedom of association and freedom of contract in Dutch industrial relations, different collective agreements have emerged with varying coverage of (groups of) companies and employees. In medium-sized and larger enterprises works councils are granted rights to information, consultation and co-determination in social affairs. In this report the structure of employee and management representation and collective bargaining will be discussed in two important transport sectors: road transport, with a focus on the agreements in freights transport, and aviation, with particular attention to the case of KLM. In road-transport multi-employer agreements exist for the large majority of enterprises, though enterprise agreements are found as well. Aviation companies have one or more enterprise agreements; sector-level collective bargaining does not exist in this sector. This paper makes a twofold contribution to the debate on industrial relations in the Netherlands. Firstly, the case of the transport sectors shows the rich institutional structure and variety of the Dutch industrial relations below the national level of consultation, both at the industrial (meso) and enterprise (micro) level. Secondly, the paper aims to illustrate how and to what extent existing regulation in the transport industry is being adapted to the processes of economic internationalisation and decentralisation of industrial relations. As road transport and aviation are very different in terms of public/private traditions, representative organisations, coverage of collective agreements and levels of collective bargaining, these two sectors will be discussed separately in each section. In this first section, the economic characteristics and general developments in road haulage and aviation will be discussed. In the second section, we will turn to the collective actors in these sectors, their representativeness and recognition in collective bargaining. In the third section, the level, structure and coverage of collective bargaining will be dealt with. In the fourth section we will discuss employee representation at company-level. In section five we discuss industrial conflict. Case studies have been conducted at collective bargaining in the road haulage sector and at Royal Dutch Airlines KLM. In the final section we draw some conclusions and give recommendation for future in-depth research. (Author/publisher)
Abstract