Radical Change and Institutional Resilience: The Case of Labour Market Reforms in Southern Europe

Over the last decade southern European labour markets have been transformed in a common neoliberal direction, as a consequence of the reforms enacted after the 2008 financial crisis. In our research we investigate to what extent these labour market reforms, aimed at promoting a radical decentralisation of collective bargaining, have actually led to such change. For that purpose, we developed a comparative study of Spain and Portugal, using the notions of path dependency and socio-political coalitions developed by historical institutionalism. Our study leads to the conclusion that institutional trajectories resulting from these labour market reforms merge profound changes with significant resilience. The neoliberal transformations of southern European labour markets have not led to the emergence of new bargaining models, nor to an institutional convergence towards the decentralised collective bargaining systems of liberal market economies. Rather, these reforms have triggered a disorganised fragmentation of collective bargaining systems, resulting in a lack of institutional coherence.