Trade Unions, Collective Bargaining, and Income Stagnation in Europe

Joshua Cova

Against a backdrop of wage stagnation, growing income inequality, and institutional decline, this project investigates trade union bargaining strategies across different contexts. In recent times, unions have pursued new strategies: organizing labor market outsiders, allying with civil society, addressing "new social risks," and reconfiguring labor politics territorially through living wage campaigns. A further, comparatively understudied avenue is the negotiation of non-wage benefits. Where wage gains have proven difficult to secure, unions have increasingly bargained over occupational pensions, supplementary healthcare, and fringe benefits: provisions that shape workers' economic security and, at times, substitute for retrenched public welfare. Yet the capacity to secure such benefits is unevenly distributed. The project therefore examines living wages and non-wage benefits as complementary strategies pursued from a position of comparatively institutional weakness, analyzing how their prevalence and content vary across economic sectors. Empirically, the project makes an original methodological contribution through the large-scale analysis of collective bargaining agreements. Employing text-as-data techniques, it constructs a novel comparative dataset of negotiated outcomes across sectors, regions, and countries, illustrating how social partners negotiate wages and non-wage benefits under changing circumstances.