Blocs, Arenas, and European Leverage in Iberian Labour Market Solidarity

This chapter develops an actor-centred framework to explain why Portugal and Spain followed divergent paths in rebuilding labour market solidarity after the sovereign-debt crisis. It identifies two governing social blocs – a Centrist–Employer bloc and a Left–Union bloc – and argues that bloc composition is a necessary, though not sufficient, determinant of reform orientation. It then contrasts the veto structures of tripartite social concertation and parliamentary law-making, contending that the former embeds a consent constraint (a joint-decision logic in which employer assent operates as a de facto veto) whereas the latter contains no institutional employer veto. The European Union is conceptualised as a conditional external selector whose longstanding liberalising bias and more recent social turn alternately constrain or enable change, typically widening statutory floors rather than overturning the crisis-era deregulatory core. Bringing these elements together, the chapter arrays eight stylised combinations of bloc, arena, and EU stance and derives expectations about when settlements will gravitate towards competitive or inclusive solidarity across four domains. Arena choice is treated as endogenous to bloc priorities. The framework yields testable propositions for the empirical chapters and specifies the conditions under which inclusive or competitive packages are most likely to be legislated.