Job Quality and Workers’ Power in Logistics in the Context of the COVID-19 (post)Pandemic Crisis in Poland

The paper explores the selected aspects of job quality (remuneration, working time/work pressure, collective interest representation) in the logistic industry in the context of the COVID-19 health and socio-economic crisis. It draws from the literature review, secondary data and expert interviews with trade union and employer organisations representatives carried out within the COV-WORK project funded by National Science Centre in Poland. The research adopts the power resources approach to explore the relevance of market, institutional, organisational and societal aspects of workers’ collective resources in various sections of logistic services on the changes of their job quality and their collective responses to these changes during pandemic. The analysis is focused on three occupational groups: (1) logistics centres employees, (2) lorry drivers, and (3) parcel-delivery couriers. The analysis suggests that the increase in workers’ structural power due to surge in demand on logistic services and their strategic importance during pandemic is insufficient for workers’ counter-actions against the deterioration of job quality during pandemic, unless reinforced by collective labour organisations (associational power)

Unionism and Workers' Strategies in Capitalist Transformation: The Polish Case Reconsidered

This article reassesses recent debates on labour weakness in Central and Eastern Europe after the end of `actually existing socialism', examining the relationship between workers' life strategies and the development of trade unionism in Poland. Biographical interviews with workers reveal three distinct patterns of coping with social change, structural conditions and their relationship to workers' activity in unions. It is suggested that recent signs of union renewal can only be sustained by re-linking the union agenda with the workers' diversified and pragmatized life strategies

‘Lean Production is Dead, Long Live Lean Production’: Lean, Neo-Liberal Crisis, Turbulence and the Consolidation of Regimes of Subordination

This paper considers the various ways in which Lean originally was understood by advocates and critics. The paper argues that notwithstanding Lean’s impact in respect of material changes to work and labour processes in addition it can be interpreted as an ideological formation and the motor of neoliberal turbulence, at once a driver of the crisis of over production and a response to it. Lean engenders at the level of the political economy the link between a range of management regimes requiring stress to systems, institutions and individuals. Locally, this process was famously described by the labour movement activist-scholars Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter as Management by Stress. We argue that it is critical to the contemporary character of the turbulence driving neoliberal retrenchment-restructuring. While we accept the French labour sociologist Jean-Pierre Durand’s description of the era in which we are living as the time of the Lean society, we offer a somewhat different angle on the nature of Lean that interprets it not simply as a management strategy for renewal but rather as a response to this period of neoliberal turbulence in which it is a central component

Lean as ideology and practice : a comparative study of the impact of Lean production on working life in automotive manufacturing in the United Kingdom and Poland

This article reports on research conducted at General Motors UK and Poland, BMW-UK and VW-Motor Poland. The development of a range of managerial practices at the workplace, often described as lean production techniques, is discussed. The focus is on the impact of the latter on employees’ quality of work-life. While advocates of lean, so-called leanistas, argue that the ‘right’ management cadre will allow the positive effects of lean to prevail, evidence confirming this assumption remains limited. In contrast to ‘lean ideology’, findings here highlight the deleterious effects of systems so defined on the quality of life at work and to workers’ health beyond employment

Tożsamości biograficzne zakładowych działaczy związkowych a rewitalizacja związków zawodowych w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej

Analizy związków zawodowych w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej sugerują, że ich obecny kryzys ma swoje źródła zarówno w strukturalnych przemianach współczesnego kapitalizmu, jak i w problemach tożsamościowych wypływających z trudności ze zredefiniowaniem ich roli po upadku państwowego socjalizmu. Istniejące badania zdominowane są jednak przez perspektywę instytucjonalną i dość rzadko podejmują problem znaczeń przypisywanych związkom zawodowym przez samych działaczy związkowych. Niniejszy artykuł proponuje nowe spojrzenie na przekształ-cenia tożsamości związkowych przez analizę relacji pomiędzy doświadczeniami biograficznymi zakładowych liderów związkowych a przemianami ich zaangażowania związkowego w czterech krajach Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej: Estonii, Polsce, Słowenii i Rumunii. Empirycznym punktem odniesienia są biograficzne wywiady narracyjne z 43 działaczami i działaczkami związkowymi w firmach sektora motoryzacyjnego i handlowego (hipermarketach), przeprowadzone w latach 2010–2011. Badania sugerują, że praca nad „oddziedziczoną” tożsamością związkową w przypadku długoletnich działaczy związków zawodowych i pojawienie się nowych, pragmatycznych tożsamości związkowych wśród ich nowych liderów są dwoma procesami tożsamościowymi, które leżą u podstaw rewitalizacji ruchu związkowego w badanych krajach. Wskazane zostają również bariery strukturalne i biograficzne, które ograniczają potencjał odnowy związków zawodowych w regionie

L’absence chez Michel Butor. L’Emploi du temps et Degrés

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible

Robotnicy i ludzie biznesu. Wzory karier zawodowych a zmiana społeczna w Polsce

Artykuł prezentuje wyniki badań nad wzorami karier zawodowych podejmowanych przez robotników i ludzi biznesu w okresie głębokiej zmiany społecznej w Polsce po 1989 roku. Pojęcia kariery, zasobów i pracy biograficznej umożliwiły zbadanie interakcji „obiektywnych” i „subiektywnych” aspektów życia zawodowego. Zastosowanie metodologii teorii ugruntowanej do analizy ponad dwustu wywiadów narracyjnych ze współczesnymi polskimi robotnikami i ludźmi biznesu pozwoliło na wykroczenie poza analizę indywidualnych przypadków i rekonstrukcję typologii karier. Wyróżnione wzory „kotwicy”, „patchworku” i „konstrukcji” idą w poprzek podziałów wyznaczonych przez dyskurs „wygranych” i „przegranych” transformacji, hierarchię organizacyjną oraz stratyfikację. Najbardziej nagradzany w nowej rzeczywistości wzór wielotorowej i długofalowo planowanej kariery-konstrukcji okazuje się jednak trudno dostępny dla większości robotników, drobnych przedsiębiorców i niższej kadry menedżerskiej. W efekcie, obiektywne nierówności na poziomie posiadanych zasobów przekładają się na procesy biograficzne prowadząc do „naturalizacji” chaotycznej kariery-patchwork oraz „pracy na pozycję” w obrębie kariery długofalowo zakotwiczonej w jednej firmie

Le Roi vierge – ou quelques insignifiantes remarques sur le duel d’un poète… et d’un monarque

Catulle Mendès was a nineteenth century French poet, novelist, librettist, literary and music critic, very famous at his times but unjustly depreciated by the next generations. The paper reminds the sphere of his activity that should never be forgotten: Mendès appears first of all as one of the main figures of the early French Wagnerism. Born in Bordeaux on the 22nd May 1841 (twenty eight years to the day after the German Master!), he got to know Richard Wagner in Paris in 1860 where the composer was giving his three famous concerts at the Italian Theatre (Théâtre-Italien) and obtained, thanks to Princess Pauline Metternich, the chance to perform his opera Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera. Twentyyear- old Mendès invited Richard Wagner to cooperate with the periodical that he had just founded, La Revue fantaisiste. However Wagner hasn’t published any text in La Revue fantaisiste. Disgusted by his Tannhäuser’s failure in Paris, he left the French capital soon. Catulle Mendès missed the good occasion to create the first French « revue wagnérienne ». Firstly, his journal’s reaction to the scandal at the Paris Opera was very terse. Secondly, Auguste de Gasperini’s study of Wagner’s operas, announced by Mendès, was going to be published not in La Revue fantaisiste, but in Le Ménestrel, the most antiwagnerian French journal of these times. Thirdly, the number of texts on music in general and on Wagner in particular published by the journal founded by Catulle Mendès was extremely small and didn’t reflect in any way his musical or Wagnerian fascinations. A few years later, in summer 1869, Catulle Mendès with his wife Judith Mendès, née Gautier, and their friend Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam paid a visit to Richard Wagner in Tribschen. It was a crucial moment for the development of their wagnerism. In September 1869 they observed in Munich the conflict between the composer and his patron, the king Ludwig II of Bavaria who wanted the first part of Wagner’s Tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, The Rhine Gold, to be performed then in Munich, despite the opposition of the author who preferred to keep all the parts of his monumental cycle for the new opera house that he was intending to construct as soon as possible somewhere in Bavaria. In 1879 Catulle Mendès wrote un roman à clef, a novel with a key, entitled Le Roi vierge – The Virgin king portraying the king Ludwig II of Bavaria and his complex relationship with Richard Wagner. This novel’s distribution in Bavaria was formally prohibited by the King who hadn’t appreciated its literary quality and his own portrait « painted » by the French writer. Responding to the King’s resolution, Catulle Mendès in 1886, a few months before Ludwig’s mysterious death, published another text à clef on Ludwig II of Bavaria and Richard Wagner. The short text entitled L’Épître au roi de Thuringe (The Epistle to the king of Thuringia) reflects their conflict of 1869 and enhances the role of a group of French Wagner’s admirers supporting the German composer in his struggle against his patron’s despotism. These two texts, Le Roi vierge and L’Épître au roi de Thuringe, are thoroughly analyzed by the author of the paper as literary expressions of Catulle Mendès’s Wagnerism

‘Communities of resistance’ and the use of newspaper discussion boards Polish workers in Japanese foreign investments

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Maciej Bancarzewski, and Jane Hardy, ‘‘Communities of resistance’ and the use of newspaper discussion boards: Polish workers in Japanese foreign investments’, New Technology, Work and Employment, Vol. 32 (2): 160-173, July 2017, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12091. Under embargo until 25 July 2019. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.This article examines the content of two hundred posts on newspaper discussion boards by workers in a cluster of Japanese foreign investments in Poland. The conclusions are first, that the material experiences of workers generate a set of themes in relation to the labour process with regard to wages and working conditions, bullying and monitoring that exhibit similarities across countries. Second, we argue that an analysis of the discourse used is shaped by political and institutional conditions, which reveal national differences in how workers perceive and locate their exploitation. Finally, in relation to debates about workers’ resistance and the use of the internet we argue that the interaction of themes related to the material experience of work are intertwined with institutionally embedded understandings of exploitation, which not only enable a shared framework for venting, but also provide the basis for a community of resistance.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio