Industrial Relations and Social Dialogue in the Age of Collaborative Economy (IRSDACE)

Abstract:

The IRSDACE project - Industrial Relations and Social Dialogue in the Age of Collaborative Economy -, funded by DG EMPL of the European Commission, aims to identify how traditional players in the labour market, e.g. trade unions, employers' associations, member states and the EU, experience and respond to the collaborative economy. IRSDACE had five main tasks: i) conceptualisation of platform work, its place in the labour market, employment policy and industrial relations; ii) analysis of discourse on platform economy among established industrial relations actors; iii) assessment of the implications of workers’ experience with the platform economy for industrial relations and social dialogue; iv) comparative analysis of national experiences; and v) analysis of how EU-level employment policy and the industrial relations agenda should respond to the emergence of work in the platforms economy. One of the project’s initial difficulties and findings relates directly to the name collaborative. It has become clear to the research partners that this new reality encompasses many situations where no collaboration (nor sharing) takes place. Hence, the partners have opted for the use of the neutral term platform economy. Nevertheless, when contacting platform workers or national stakeholders, the researchers were faced with the need to use the corresponding local language terms of collaborative or sharing economy as these are the names known to the general public. We therefore recommend that these terms are treated as synonyms in the context of the IRSDACE results. Seven country case studies have been produced in this project covering Belgium, France, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Spain and Denmark. The country case studies were prepared based on literature reviews, interviews and country focus groups. The methods used as well as the results for each country are described in each individual report. The reports show both the perspectives of industrial relations actors at the national level and the experiences of platform workers. A final project output brings the national case study results together in a comparative study. The project started in January 2017, finishing in December 2018. CEPS is the project coordinator in a partnership with IZA (DE), FAOS at the University of Copenhagen (DK), Fundación Alternativas (ES) and CELSI (SK).

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