Collective bargaining, incomes policy and relative wage flexibility in Greek manufacturing, 1966-1988.

Based on the assumption that industrial relations influence labour market outcomes, the thesis examines first, the characteristics and the evolution of bargaining structures and procedures in the Greek system of industrial relations, second, the governmental policies aimed at wage and employment regulation, and third, the extent to which, in the context of developments in industrial relations as well as in the context of incomes policy, there was room for relative wage flexibility in the Greek manufacturing sector. The main conclusion of the thesis is that, despite the extensive and continuous regulation of wage determination procedures by successive governments, changes in industrial relations which occurred after 1975 and were marked by decentralised, fragmented and informal collective bargaining, were accompanied by flexibility in relative wages. The sources of this flexibility, which is largely noncompetitive, are related to industry-specific productivity gains as well as to industry-specific rates of strike activity. Moreover, the rise of decentralised, fragmented and informal collective bargaining influenced the effectiveness of the norm-based and the indexation incomes policies as far as variation in the inter-industry wage structure in the Greek manufacturing sector is concerned