The development of statutory minimum wage setting in the EU and its significance for the trade unions

Duration: 01/2020 - 09/2021
Status: completed
Research area: Industrial relations and co-determination
Key project staff: Georg Adam

The research project deals with the dynamics of statutory minimum wage systems over the past 15 years in those EU Member States recording such unilateral-administrative wage-setting mechanisms, focusing on changes in the arrangement, function and coverage of these systems. In particular, amendments to the statutory minimum wage regimes shall be captured and analysed in the context of the challenges to the national industrial relations systems in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008 onwards which have generally been characterised by the weakening of the collective bargaining systems. Special attention is to be paid to the (changed) role of the labour market parties, in particular the trade unions, in the designing of the national wage-setting regimes, by applying the so-called power resources approach.