Negotiating agency and structure: Trade union organizing strategies in a hostile environment

Abstract

This article investigates a case of successful union organizing in one automotive assembly plant in Romania. The authors argue that in order to explain why the union succeeds in defending workers’ rights there is a need to consider both structural and agency aspects that condition labor’s capacity to effectively defend their interests. The findings show that the union at the Romanian plant has made use of a diverse repertoire of protest activities in order to defend its worker constituency. The authors also discuss why as of late protests are less and less used by the union in response to the shifting economic and political environment in which the plant is embedded. They argue that a closer look at the strategy of the Romanian union and the path it has taken in the past decade provides a better understanding of the conditions for union success in an economic, legal, and political environment that has become increasingly hostile toward organized labor. In this sense, the article points to the more general situation unions in Central and Eastern Europe have found themselves in recent years.

Neo-liberal subjectivities and the emergence of spiritual entrepreneurship: An analysis of spiritual development programs in contemporary Romania

“…The new laws redefined the member threshold required for a union to engage in negotiations with management and it made it extremely difficult to create union confederations that could fight at the national level for the protection of workers' rights (Adăscăliței and Guga, 2015;Stoiciu, 2016aStoiciu, , 2016bTrif, 2013). If before the crisis Romania had a progressive Labor Code that protected the rights of workers through collective and sectorial agreements which established the mandatory framework for negotiating company-level agreements, after the financial crisis the new legislative changes shifted the locus of social dialogue from a centralized space of interaction (where unions could cooperate and impose national agreements) to a local setting.…”

Post-socialist labour and the dual logic of collective action: workers’ unrest and trade union strategy in Fiat Automobiles Serbia

“…Against this background, a new strand of literature argues that a focus on industrial conflicts at the plant level may challenge such a bleak picture (Adăscăliţei and Guga, 2017; Varga, 2014, 2013). Where scholars register apathy and co-optation on the part of trade union officials in forms of illusionary corporatism (Ost, 2000) and concession bargaining (Bernaciak, 2013; Hyman, 2010; Ivlevs and Veliziotis, 2017), plant-level workers’ contention erupts nonetheless.…”

“…Studies of labour in the post-socialist region generally converge on acknowledging the weakness of workers’ organisations at the national and sectoral levels. Recent research, nonetheless, challenges the idea of uniformly weak labour movements (Grdešić, 2008; Kosović and Copîl, 2016; Meardi, 2007) and highlights the emergence of new repertoires of organisation and contention (Bernaciak and Kahancová, 2017; Greskovits, 2015; Mrozowicki, 2014), or the persistence of workers’ protests and conflict at the plant level (Adăscăliţei and Guga, 2017; Varga, 2013, 2014). In other words, in the post-socialist context, workers are able to mobilise contentiously despite unions’ marginality and therefore trade union fragility does not always reflect workers’ acquiescence.…”

Tensions in the periphery: Dependence and the trajectory of a low-cost productive model in the Central and Eastern European automotive industry

“…Although the union continued to successfully negotiate wage increases over the next years (see Figure 5), these were far from satisfactory for either union leaders or regular members. By the time of the 2007 annual negotiations, the union was already showing signs of breaking the power play tactics that management had adopted since the 2003 strike (see Adăscăliței and Guga, 2017).…”

“…The changing manner in which the union negotiates the annual collective labour agreements also indicates that it has toned down its confrontational tactics. Since the general strike of 2008, the number of strike threats and protests at the plant has been on the decline, with the union choosing to negotiate with management behind closed doors and delivering somewhat poorer than expected wage increases (Adăscăliței and Guga, 2017). More recently, relocation threats have lost clout, as the Romanian plant has become increasingly specialized in producing the Duster, while production for the Logan and the Sandero has progressively moved to Morocco.…”