Between Apprehension and Support: Social Dialogue, Democracy, and Industrial Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe

This article explores the attitudes of trade union organizations to restructuring and privatization of their enterprises to strategic foreign investors in Central and Eastern Europe\u27s biggest steel producers: Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia. Contrary to advocates of insulating technocratic decision-makers from social partners, this article argues that higher quality of democracy and concomitant social dialogue carried out at the level of the sector with union organizations that are autonomous of the government in power (as was the case in the Czech Republic and Poland), are associated with greater restructuring and with support for privatization to strategic foreign investors. In these circumstances, the unions actually pressure reluctant governments to accelerate the privatization process. By contrast, politically motivated capture of individual enterprise-level unions and splitting them from sectoral-level organizations, as occurred in countries with lower quality of democracy (Romania and Slovakia), weakens the autonomous sectoral-level organizations, which are generally supportive of restructuring. Conversely, captured unions remain far more resistant to reform than their counterparts belonging to autonomous sectoral organizations. Thus, higher quality of democracy and concomitant vibrant social dialogue safeguard industrial restructuring

Keep trying? Polish failures and half-successes in social pacting

Social dialogue in post-1989 Poland has followed a long and curvy road. Introduction of tripartism, establishment of social dialogue institutions and conclusion of the 'Pact on the Transformation of State Enterprise' in 1993 propelled high hopes and expectations towards the domestic mutation of neocorporatism. In the following years, however, social dialogue in Poland would not produce another social pact, despite the fact that tripartite institutions have been working on regular basis and number of minor agreements have been consensually reached. The overall reception of Polish social dialogue both locally and internationally has been mixed with negative opinions prevailing. The article aims to show that such dismissive views are oversimplified by providing an account of obstacles, functions, chances and achievements social dialogue has had in Poland in comparison to western countries that did sign social pacts

Between consolidation and crisis : divergent pressures and sectoral trends in Poland

This article describes the evolution of social dialogue and collective bargaining in Poland between 2008 and 2012, arguing that the effects of the crisis have been asymmetrical in two ways. First, while Poland is the only EU country to have avoided recession in macroeconomic terms, the crisis has actually disproportionately affected labour through higher unemployment and worsening employment conditions. Secondly, in a decentralized system like the Polish one, effects of the crisis have differed by sector. Sectors exposed to international competition such as the automotive and steel sectors have suffered from job losses and major restructuring, while services and construction have withstood better. While social dialogue has been temporarily re-legitimized during the crisis, it plays only a sporadic role