Trade Unions in Europe: Meeting the Challenge edited by Deborah Foster and Peter Scott, Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2003, 200 pages, ISBN 90-5201-959-2.

Over the two past decades it has became common to refer to the crisis of European trade unionism. Recent studies have offered some indication of the major facets and current dilemmas affecting trade unions in Europe, but the analysis has not always received a European approach in the wider literature. Numerous interpretations have been engaged with a national orientation while discussing the nature of the challenges facing trade unions in Europe. They have most notably dealt with issues covering union exclusion at the workplace, decentralization of collective bargaining, shifts in the sectoral composition of employment, expansion of temporary and atypical jobs, and new forms of international flexibility in each domestic environment, on one hand. On the other hand, how these challenges have been addressed in the areas of union retention and organization in the different national contexts has also been considered. Deborah Foster and Peter Scott’s edited collection Trade Unions in Europe: Meeting the Challenge draws from examining the impact of economic Europeanization on the institutions of trade unionism at the European level in general, and on national trade unions in particular. Hence, under the new features of European economic integration, the analysis sets out to explore “the processes whereby unions are confronting changes potentially threatening their future relevance, viability and standing” (page 11). These processes can be summarized as follows: social dialogue within Europe, European Works Councils (EWCs) within transnational firms, Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the so-called open method of coordination (OMC). This is of crucial importance if we want to know whether, to a certain extent, it is possible to identify a particular European social model, which exhibits the attempt to preserve a balance between social benefits and the spheres of economic activity. Through a carefully selection of debates and papers which were presented at the Conference entitled “European Unions 2000,” organized by the University of the West of England (Bristol, UK), their book aims to examine how (if any) trade unions are meeting the challenge of representing the interests of labour in an increasingly complex and influential European environment. The book itself contains a challenging proposal, both theoretically and empirically, which consists in the interest to explore whether, or to what extent, it is possible to identify a common trade union policy for social Europe while trying to evaluate “the role and influence of trade unions and the nature of their responses” (page 9) at both the supra-national level and within the workplace. Developments in social dialogue and collective bargaining are also seen as directed towards the achievement of an articulated structure of trade unionism. In other words, as Keller argues in the chapter on social dialogue, the resistance of employers to developing more concerted activities at the European level must be overcome if weaknesses in trade union articulation are overwhelmed on one hand, and whereby more wide-ranging progress towards Europeanization is recorded on the other hand. However, according to Keller the likelihood of such a goal is currently threatened by two sets of factors: the weak willingness on the part of national actors to transfer responsibility for social and employment policies to supranational agents and the extent to which different national union traditions and experiences can be effectively accommodated at the European level. Although various European initiatives (such as the OMC) have been developed in this respect and they work as a form of cross-national benchmarking, Philippe Pochet argues that the significance of such initiatives for trade unions has been relatively modest to date. This is because there remain considerable national differences in the extent to which trade unions as national social actors have …