The Restructuring of Wage-Setting Fields between Transnational Competition and Coordination

This article addresses the restructuring of wage-setting institutions in social services in Austria and Germany and seeks to better understand the forces shaping their changes and continuities. Social services include a wide range of services such as labour market policies or elderly care provided by state, private for- and non-profit organisations. Despite similar pressures resulting from European and national politics of economic liberalisation and austerity and the emergence of transnational corporations and labour migration wage-setting in social services turned out to follow different institutional paths. This article expands conventional theorising by using a social field perspective to uncover the role of (institutionalised) power relations and conflict dynamics in shaping the wage-setting institutions. While existing institutions and particular power relations between regional and national actors helped create a common wage-setting field in Austrian social services, the interactions between national and regional, and, to a lesser extent, transnational field participants have led to fragmented and still contested institutions of wage setting in German social services.