Employers’ associations and European social dialogue: chronicles of a stalemate foretold

The paper focuses on role and functions of employers’ organizations at the supranational level. Starting from the analysis of the promotional framework of regulation of the European social dialogue, the article deals with the notion of employers’ representativeness emerging at the supranational level. The concept of "European representativeness" is examined, in particular, with reference to: i) the criteria for measuring the representative weight (both of trade unions and employers’ associations) identified by the European Commission since its Communications of the 90s – criteria subsequently specified by a judgment of the Court of First Instance of the EU and progressively clarified by Eurofound studies; ii) the substantial inadequacy of this criteria to deal with the fragmentation of the representation of business interests in the EU.The topic of the representative fragmentation of the employers is then expressly declined in the context of the sectoral social dialogue, in which it assumes, along with other destructuring factors, a relevant role in the crisis of the supranational social dialogue. In the final part of the paper, the Author proposes some reflections about the (uncertain) perspectives of relaunch of the European social dialogue