Conflictual Complementarity: New Labour Actors in Corporatist Industrial Relations

Liberalisation of industrial relations entails the weakening of unions and a respective rise of alternative, ‘new labour actors’, altering traditional class representation by introducing new strategies. Research on this phenomenon has focused on decentralised contexts, where new actors are seen to pursue both independent strategies as well as cooperation with unions to contest rising employers’ discretion. Drawing on multiple qualitative methodologies, this article analyses the roles and contributions of new actors in the context of corporatist industrial relations, to find rising conflicts between them and unions. Combining social movement theories of strategic change with industrial relations theories of power and theories of institutional complementarity, reveals conflictual forms of complementarity between new actors and corporatist unions. Through interacting with new labour actors, corporatist union strategies are seen to change in a ‘spin-off’ form, reforming unions’ traditional power and dominance to (partially) counter previous liberalisation of industrial relations.