Transport and Telecom

In this chapter, we examine internationalization, wages, working conditions, and industrial relations in transport and telecommunications, or, to put it more precisely, transport and storage (NACE H, codes49–53) as well as telecommunications (NACE 61). Of these two, transport and storage is by far the largest sector. In the EU27 it employed about 10.3 million people in 2010, or slightly over 5 per cent of total employment. In the 13 countries under scrutiny, 8.9 million were employed (86 per cent of the European Union (EU) total) and 6,270,000 (61 per cent) in the ten countries for which we have Wageïndicator data. The telecommunications sector was much smaller, and employed slightly over 1.1 million people in 2010 in the EU27. In the 13 countries we studied 923,000 were employed in telecommunications (83 per cent of the EU total) and in the ten countries 636,000 (57 per cent). Between 1995 and 2006, employment in the EU transport sector grew annually by 2.0 per cent but in 2007–2008 growth slowed down.1 Such a slowdown had already occurred some years earlier in the telecommunications industry. In the 1990s, turnover and employment in telecom both grew strongly but, after the turn of the century, employment growth between 2000 and 2006 declined to an annual average of only 0.3 per cent (TNO 2009b, 2009c). Thereafter, from 2008 to 2010, employment (headcount) in both industries fell substantially in the EU27: in transport by approximately 4 per cent and in telecom by nearly 6 per cent. For the ten countries with Wageïndicator data, the decrease in transport was somewhat lower but for telecom it was even more severe.2