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Belgium’s social concertation model is extraordinarily resilient. Social dialogue is institutionally firmly embedded and the social partners continue to wield significant influence in shaping social and economic policy. Belgium is also among the few rich countries not to have seen growing income inequalities. Belgium maintains just about the most equal wage distribution in the capitalist world – including one of the smallest gender pay gaps – and there is little evidence of precarisation of work. The key argument of this chapter is that robust social dialogue has helped to contain inequality. The Belgian experience thus provides a powerful antidote to views that growing inequalities are inevitable. However, Belgium’s labour market is not as inclusive as we would wish and this, too, has to be seen, at least in part, in the context of the institutional rigidities and insider biases inherent in an extensive social concertation model such as Belgium’s.

Once considered an exception among the post-socialist countries owing to its inclusive industrial relations system and the role of social dialogue, the conditions for the social compromise in Slovenia have eroded significantly since mid-2000s. The pressures intensified in the post-2008 period when social dialogue at the national level virtually collapsed, the gap in working conditions and wages between sectors of the economy widened, while precarisation and increased unemployment seriously undermined the position of trade unions at the company level. In cases when collective bargaining was not mere ‘concession bargaining’ it often resulted in reduction of various forms of inequality but, with regard to weaker unions and non-unionised segments of the labour force, union actions at the national level proved crucial for imposing certain minimum standards. On the rare occurrences when meaningful social dialogue at the national level did take place, the results were more pronounced on the flexibility rather than the security side.