'Miracle' by consensus? Consensualism and dominance in Dutch employment development

The impressive increase in employment in the Netherlands since 1985 is widely discussed. In the country itself a 'model discourse' has developed which presents this success as a result of a consensus between capital and tabour to (drastically) restrain wages. The consensus is considered to be based on a process of social learning by the unions. The causal nexus between wage restraint and employment growth turns out to be doubtful, however. Other processes seem to have been more relevant for the latter, and the question is what the Dutch unions had to learn and why they should have consented to the wage restraint formula. The historical evidence suggests that until the late 1980s the unions, although they de facto acquiesced to wage restraint, had different views and that explicit capital-tabour consensus only became established unequivocally when the employment 'miracle' became obvious in the mid-1990s. With respect to the 1980s, the unions' behaviour should rather be interpreted as submission to the dominant interpretation of the general interest. Changing power relations and the very mechanism of Dutch consensualism pushed them to do so.