LESS IS MORE, OR MORE IS A MUST? A study on how European cross-sectorial social partners navigate when advocating their position on platform work.

Abstract

This thesis aims at examining how cross industrial social partners seek legitimacy in a European context; a context defined by a patchwork of welfare regimes where the same kind of actors can come to contradictory solutions to the same problem. In focus are the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and BUSINESSEUROPE (BE), and how they balance between claims on the social good and their own interest as an advocacy group while acting on a labour market, shaped by digitalisation and structural transformation. The problem examined is how legitimacy is maintained by the union and employer side respectively, by drawing on the theoretical framework of the institutional logic perspective. The method used is document analysis with both a quantitative and qualitative approach. Regarding the results, ETUC and BE is shown to direct focus to different problems and to construct different problem representations. Regarding the responsibility they see for political actors, ETUC engage more in protecting rights and BE more in developing resources. They derive legitimacy from mainly the same institutional logics but not in the same way, uncovering a tension between understanding the platform worker as exploited (ETUC) or as autonomous (BE). State logic is found to be the main area of conflict. The European context is also handled with different strategies, ETUC lifts the problems facing the workers and emphasise the need of protecting workers from unfair working conditions, regardless of national context. BE focuses on the need of respecting the different Members States own systems and uses the European context to argue against further regulations as minimum rights for platform workers as drawing on the principle of subsidiarity and the need of a regulatory framework that lets innovation flow and jobs and the economy grow.