The Social Dialogue as a Source of EU Legal Acts – Past Performance and Future Perspectives

EU law recognizes the regulatory role of social partners—the bodies representing management and labour—but provides neither a legal nor a fully developed conceptual framework. An output analysis of the texts produced by the social partners demonstrates that they fulfil a variety of functions, both as stakeholders and co-regulators. However, only a small percentage of the documents produced in the European social dialogue have the status of EU collective agreements. It is the latter group which is most interesting from the point of view of regulation. A further analysis tracks the different interactions between EU law and EU collective agreements and highlights the tension between horizontal and vertical subsidiarity created by the REFIT agenda.