Employment relations under external pressure : Italian and Spanish reforms in 2010 - 12

Introduction Despite pervasive debates around globalisation, the effect of international organisation and of foreign governments on labour relations has received little attention in industrial relations and in labour process theory: the former has long focussed on national institutions, while the latter has focussed on the company level or on capitalism in general. The drastic reforms passed in Southern Europe since 2010 under direct pressure from the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and indirect pressure from the German government, raise therefore interesting questions: the issue of ‘external pressure’ require a more sophisticated analysis of the multiple links between national and supranational actors and of intra-class divisions. The paper discusses the cases of Spain and Italy, which (as from March 2012) have not needed rescue from the IMF and are not yet under direct supervision, but which have been forced by the sovereign debt crisis to comply with unprecedented requirements from the European Commission and the European Central Bank. The paper will reconstruct the reform paths of these two countries, in connection with both changing EU policy tools (before and after the crisis) and the state of the so-called ‘Mediterranean model’ of capitalism and of labour relations. The analysis is based on documents, secondary literature, press, documents and interviews with social partners and with European Commission representatives. Conclusions will be drawn on emerging tensions between ‘disembedded’ or ‘disconnected’ and embedded forms of capitalism.