his article examines the role of collective bargaining in addressing flexibility and security in the chemical and pharmaceutical sector in Italy and Denmark. My multi-level and comparative focus on collective bargaining highlights that sector-level industrial relations institutions account for a considerable degree of within-country homogeneity in the content of company agreements over issues of flexibility and security. Moreover, it shows that the degree of company-level heterogeneity is conditioned primarily by firm-level contingencies: union representation and organizational characteristics. This means that at company level, both institutional and non-institutional structures are important explanatory variables.