What Do Unions and Employers Negotiate Under the Umbrella of Corporate Social Responsibility? Comparative Evidence from the Italian Metal and Chemical Industries

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) and industrial relations (IR) studies have evolved mostly in parallel. In this paper, we integrate the IR with the CSR perspective, highlighting their similarities and differences. In particular, the study adopts a framework which includes a wide set of CSR-related issues to explore what unions and companies negotiate under the umbrella of CSR. It analyses and compares the national sectoral agreements of two key industries in the Italian economy, i.e. Metal and Chemical. We find that these two sectors exhibit differences because the CSR-related issues covered by the two contracts are formally labelled as CSR in the Chemical contract, and not labelled as CSR in the Metal contract. We also find similarities regarding the CSR-related issues covered and not covered by the national contracts, and the binding processes centrally negotiated for their implementation. We interpret the similarities in light of the specificities of the Italian IR system, and the differences in light of the negotiation traditions of the two sectors under study, which induce the actors in the Metal sector (traditionally with more conflictual IR relations) to focus more on what differentiates the CSR and IR perspectives, and the actors in the Chemical sector (traditionally with more cooperative IR relations) to focus more on what the CSR and IR perspectives share.