Changing Employment Relations in Spain and Romania during the Great Recession: how trade unions respond to the challenge

This paper discusses the impact of the crisis and national labor market reforms in Spain and Romania on trade unions’ bargaining power and strategies at the local level. While unions’ power has generally declined at the national level due to neoliberal globalization, and specifically due to the economic crisis, empirical findings from four case studies in capital-intensive sectors (automotive, steel and renewable energies) reveal strong union power at the local level. The impact of the decentralization of industrial relations is not linear across sectors and national contexts but rather context-specific.0