Harnessing collective bargaining for fostering sustainability and competitiveness: fact or fiction?

Modern societal and environmental challenges increasingly pressure business organizations to embrace corporate sustainability. However, achieving a “just” transition in the business sector involves navigating tensions among multiple and sometimes divergent demands of economic, societal and environmental sustainability, reconciling the needs and expectations of a wide range of societal actors. Addressing this challenge necessitates participatory and collaborative instruments that, while advancing corporate sustainability efforts, also mediate between societal actors in the attempt to reconcile divergent needs. In this view, this short paper aims to examine the opportunity offered by collective bargaining as a participatory and inclusive instrument apt at promoting corporate sustainability while reconciling divergent economic, societal and environmental demands through negotiation among societal actors, namely labor unions and employers’ representatives. The research project is ongoing as it examines the collective bargaining process aimed at the renewal of the national collective labor contract within the Italian metalworking industry in 2024. The present extended abstract thus presents the theoretical groundings, methodological approach and expected results.