Public Procurement as a new arena of industrial relations

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A broad range of empirical studies have investigated the implications of outsourcing of public tasks to private contractors and have largely found negative effects on the quality of employment conditions in the privatised companies. This deterioriation of job quality is primarily seen as a consequence of the gap between the public and the private sector in terms of pay levels and the strength of industrial relations. Yet there is an increasing awareness at the political level that public authorities as well have ways and means of influencing working conditions in the contracted companies, for instance by making certain social standards a selection criteria in public procurement procedures. This set of policies adds a third actor to the usually bilateral balancing of interests between employer and employee representatives: public administration. Hence, the transition from the "interventionist" to the "regulatory" state gives rise to new trilateral interest configurations which so far have not been investigated systematically. The project aims to describe and explain the varied manifestations and results of these increasingly relevant trilateral negotiation processes. The central question of the research project is therefore how the conflicting interests in this negotiation arena (budget consolidation, normative expectations regarding socially responsible procurement, the profit interests of the private sector employer and employee concerns) are balanced. The core of the empirical inquiry consists of in-depth qualitative case studies on public procurement processes in a selection of local authorities. Additionally, documents from procurement processes covering a broader geographical area will be analysed. From a conceptual and analytical point of view, the research project presupposes, based on the author's previous work, that the interaction between procurement-specific processes and the general institutional context, particularly labour market regulations and the system of industrial relations, will deserve particular attention. The empirical investigation therefore compares public procurement procedures in two industries (waste disposal and contract catering) that are most dissimilar with regard to the institutional context. The research project thereby contributes to the study of industrial relations in an emerging arena of collective bargaining and seeks to analyse the dynamics, power relations and (re)distributive consequences of bargaining in this arena.