The power of trade unions has been reduced, national pay bargaining and other labour-market rigidities scrapped, and cuts in tax rates and stricter rules for claiming unemployment benefits have improved the incentive to work.

ECONOMIST: On the brink of recession?

The second was a show of deference to Hiroshi Okuda, Toyota's chairman, who heads the Keidanren, a powerful business federation, which stands for company management and is a vocal advocate of both lower labour costs and wage-bargaining reform.

ECONOMIST: Deflation is transforming Japan's annual pay rituals

"It's a legitimate bargaining position" one Labour MP told me, knowing full well it's not much more than that.

BBC: When David met Carwyn: the sequel

The integration of China and other emerging economies into the world trading system has, in effect, more than doubled the global labour force, and by curbing workers' bargaining power it has restrained pay demands in most developed economies in recent years.

ECONOMIST: Why China is not to blame for the surge in global inflation

So it may be that it is in relation to the Labour Party, rather than in terms of industrial bargaining power, that the biggest changes have occurred.

BBC: NEWS | Business | The trade unions' long decline

Fiat has thus made two big breaks with Italy's collective-bargaining tradition, says Roberto Pedersini, a labour-relations expert.

ECONOMIST: Italy worries that its biggest manufacturer may leave

But for others, the move may be seen as a bold - and strategically wise - attempt to defend the carefully constructed and heavily politicised system of collective bargaining, which has been at the heart of South African labour policy since the end of apartheid and which has, over the past few weeks, seemed on the brink of collapse.

BBC: South Africa's mine owners flex their muscles