CAMS
CAMS is coordinated by Professor Steve Jefferys and Dr Sonia McKay of the Working Lives Research Institute on behalf of an international steering group constituted by the research partners. There will be an international meeting at the start of the project with researchers from all participating countries. This meeting will finalise the project questions, comparative framework and research methods. Contacts will be maintained with e-mail and at monthly Skype conferences. The partners will also meet at the international workshops.
The methods proposed by the first international meeting will be continuously improved by discussions with practitioners from the social partners. The main fora for this dialogue are the small national advisory boards established in each of the five countries, and also the broader national and international workshops.
Project partners
The five countries chosen (France, Italy, Poland, Portugal and the UK) represent different industrial relation systems with different forms and traditions of third party conflict resolution. France has a little used but potentially powerful national level government intervention alongside local level individual conciliation. The UK has an independent state conciliation agency within a liberal labour market system. Italy has a strong self-regulating conflict resolution tradition but with conciliation interventions possible in the public sector. Poland represents a system with an elaborate conciliation system for collective disputes that union weakness means are now rarely accessed. Portugal has a extensive state mediation system organised directly through the Ministry of Labour. The research partners chosen bring to CAMS industrial relations expertise and close contact with the social partners (France, Italy, Portugal and the UK) and two direct actors, a public authority conciliation agency (the UK) and a major trade union confederation (Poland).
Project methods
Advisory boards
Partners will form small, three to five strong national advisory boards of public authority and independent conciliation agents and social partners to help frame the collection of primary information on patterns of individual and collective conflict resolution across the five European states representing different labour market and alternative dispute resolution systems. The advisory board experts will help assure access to the interviewing required in the preparatory phases in order to interpret and analyse this information. They will also advise on the choice of case studies. These advisory boards will meet three times during the project.
Data sources
In each country the research partners will collect the data on trends over the last 10-15 years in collective disputes and individual grievances and conflicts. They will also assemble all the available data on third party interventions in work-related conflicts.
Interviews with key actors
In each country interviews will be conducted with key actors involved in national conciliation, arbitration and mediation agencies as well as with conciliation-user employee and employer organisations. These interviews will aim to establish current trends and to understand the pressures for change and the responses to those pressures.
Case studies
In each country two case studies will be undertaken to reflect the different ways in which conciliation, arbitration and mediation takes place, or the different ways in which the agencies or conciliation actors are responding to the changing demands for their services.