New UNI report: Buying decent work

The revised European Public Procurement Directives from 2014 have paralleled and supported efforts in EU member states to move away from ’buying cheap’ towards ‘buying best value’ and ‘buying social’ in public procurement practices. These efforts respond to an increasing awareness at the political level that public purchasers have the power to affect working conditions as well as private contractors’ behaviour. In doing so, they can counteract the spread of precarious work and widening social divides between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in the labour market. Social partners at the European level have also been proactive in requesting and supporting public authorities to exploit the available legal options to foster job and service quality when awarding contracts – examples include ‘Best Value Guides’ developed by social partners in Cleaning and Security Services (EFCI, CoESS & UNI Europa) that provide practical and technical expertise to both private and public clients on how to insert social and quality criteria when tendering cleaning and security services.

Yet the emergent norm of ‘buying social’, or more specifically, of ‘buying decent work’ can be at odds with aims and restrictions of competition law, and with financial restrictions and targets for debt reduction. Moreover, next to legal and financial constraints, a practical challenge for developing more inclusive variants of public supply chain governance is that this requires actors to experiment with new forms of inter-organisational coordination. Contracting authorities are expected to assume more responsibility and to some extent ‘co-manage’ working conditions in contracted firms. Employee representatives and employers are faced with a more active role of the ‘invisible third hand’, i.e. the public client, in the trilateral employment relationship between client, management, and employees of the contracted company.

This report investigates the strategies social partners, public purchasers, civil society organisations, state agencies and companies adopt, and the challenges they face, in their efforts to secure decent work through public procurement in two sectors – cleaning and security services. Further knowledge of different sector and country experiences is vital to illuminate what purchasers, social partners and other actors can do and do to keep up the recent momentum towards buying social, and more specifically, towards ‘buying decent work’.

The project brings together six research institutions from across Europe and is supported by the employers’ associations CoESS and EFCI, trade unions in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the UK, as well as three European Works Councils (EWCs).

Download and read the executive summaries of the country reports:

• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Poland
• United Kingdom

Download and read the final country reports:

• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Poland
• United Kingdom

Download and read the final PROCURFAIR Comparative report.