BARSOP country report: The Netherlands

This report analyses the evolution and the role of industrial relations in the public sector in the Netherlands in the period 2000-2015, focussing on three sub-sectors: hospitals, primary education and municipalities and their task of re-integrating jobseekers. After introducing the Dutch public sector, public sector reforms, and industrial relations, the parts on sub-sectors discuss 1) changes in industrial relations and the shape of public sector reform; 2) the influence of social partners on reform processes and implementation; and 3)
effects of reforms on employment and, in turn, effects of the latter on availability and quality of public services. The role of the financial and economic crisis is a recurring theme in addressing these topics. Our in-depth analysis of the various sub-sectors is based on statistical data, documents and interviews with social
partners and policy makers.
We find that for hospitals, municipalities, and primary education, the landscape of actors has remained stable overall. However, patterns of interaction of the social partners varied from somewhat more consensual in the hospital sector to less consensual in municipalities where collective agreement negotiations
were long-drawn and sometimes got held up by industrial action. The latter was also the case in the primary education sector, which recently saw widespread collective action. Furthermore, all sub-sectors experienced major systemic changes between 2000-2015, although the speed differed: municipalities saw stepwise reforms in re-integration and a large reform in 2015. Hospitals were confronted with systemic health system change in 2006. In primary education, schools’ financing method changed to lump-sum financing. Social partners mainly used lobbying strategies towards the central government, however, with differences in intensity between employers and trade unions across sub-sectors and over time. Next, effects of reforms on employment included mixed developments in terms of employment numbers and consequences in terms of
e.g. higher work pressure and crisis-induced zero-wage policies in some sub-sectors. Finally, effects of changes in employment on public service provision are hard to establish because of other influences, but the risk of deterioration of services is recognized by especially trade unions despite notable efforts to
increase public transparency of quality, for instance in hospitals, and professionalization, for instance in municipal re-integration services.