Collective Bargaining on Working Time: Recent European Experiences, edited by Maarten Keune and Bela Galgóczi, Brussels: ETUI-REHS, 2006, 290 pp., ISBN-10: 2-874520-14-4.

The relationships between work and time have become increasingly complex in recent decades, with shifts away from standard working hours, the growth in nonstandard employment, and an increased blurring of boundaries between work and non-work time definitive of new working time patterns. In particular, pressure for employer-oriented “flexibility”—through either demands for longer hours or increases in part-time and temporary employment contracts—is driving key working time transitions. Working time has historically been a central issue around which unions organized and bargained collectively. In the 19^th century, unions in both North America and Western Europe organized to regulate the length of the working day. In the post-World War II era, collective bargaining contributed to the normalization of the standard workweek, with additional compensation for overtime hours, in unionized sectors of industrialized labour markets. Through the 1980s and 1990s, however, an employer-led offensive to restructure the organization of work placed labour movements on the defensive, and altered the context in which unions have sought to regulate working time. As the impacts of working time change are connected to job quality, employment security, and labour market equality, unions have struggled to use collective bargaining to redefine the way in which time is organized in the contemporary workplace. The collection of reports contained in Collective Bargaining on Working Time: Recent European Experiences captures these tendencies, exploring both changing patterns in working time across European labour markets, as well as the ways in which European trade unions are attempting to re-regulate working time in order to increase workers’ control over their time at work and thereby improve their quality of life outside work. The book is a collection of 21 country reports, each outlining changing working time patterns, legislative provisions regulating working time, union policies on working time, and collective bargaining outcomes in recent years. While the book is divided into individual country reports, several key themes run through the chapters. A primary theme is the widespread shift towards employer-oriented “flexibility.” In many countries this has manifested itself in employer attempts to gain greater control over in the organization of working time. Employers in Belgium, for example, have altered traditional bargaining patterns around working time by pressuring for higher levels of overtime and, like employers in Switzerland, have called for a longer normal work week. German employers have exerted great pressure in recent bargaining to increase weekly hours and to secure “opt-out” clauses in collective agreements. In Denmark, employers have pushed for a decentralization of the collective bargaining system, moving more negotiation to the company level, and have also pressured for greater flexibility in the averaging of weekly hours. Another key theme in the text is the role of legislation in shaping the parameters of bargaining around working time. As neoliberalism has taken hold in many European parliaments, governments have increasingly sought to support employer-oriented “flexibility” initiatives. The U.K. serves as a key example, where the government has clearly signaled its intentions to counter “over-regulation,” for example by introducing the capacity for workers to “opt out” of weekly hours of work limits. There, working time legislation is further compromised by a weak enforcement regime. The implementation of the 35-hour workweek in France sits at the other end of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, legislative measures adopted since the election of a neoliberal government in 2002 have increased employers’ flexibility with respect to overtime hours, charting a path that brings France closer in line with tendencies elsewhere in Europe. The movement towards “time flexibility” has manifested itself in collective agreements in recent years. For example, in Austria the collective agreement for the IT sector establishes provisions for …