Varieties of trade union organizing in Central and Eastern Europe: A comparison of the retail and automotive sectors

Abstract

This article seeks to explain variations in trade union approaches to membership recruitment in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the automotive and retail sectors in Estonia, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. The analysis accounts for cross-country and sectoral differences in organizing approaches by reference to the role of institutional contexts, union organizational resources and trade unionists' social agency.

Union Campaigns against Precarious Work in the Retail Sector of Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia

“…More generally, the chapter has demonstrated how opportunities and constraints embedded in institutional context have influenced union resources and responses to precarisation. Our analysis supports the role of encompassing institutions, including high coverage of collective agreements, as a tool to combat precarious work (Doellgast et al 2016;Mrozowicki, 2014). However, we conclude that unions' associational power (Levesque and Murray 2010; Silver 2003) and institutional power (Dörre et al 2009, 37) are crucial for the institutions to function and bring gains for labour.…”

“…1 Our earlier studies on the retail and automotive sectors demonstrated that Slovenian trade unions' higher institutional power tended to support collective bargaining solutions to the problems of precarisation that followed the 2007 global economic crisis. By contrast, unilateral responses predominated in Estonia and Poland, where the institutional power of unions was weaker, (Mrozowicki 2014;Mrozowicki et al 2013).…”

“…We can distinguish between several theses in the literature regarding the effects of institutional and sectoral factors and trade union power resources on trade union strategies towards precarious employment (Benassi and Dorigatti 2015;Benassi and Vlandas 2015;Pulignano and Signoretti 2016;Mrozowicki 2014;Trif et al 2016). One argument holds that encompassing institutions increase unions' institutional power, understood as the ability of unions to regulate employment conditions through collective bargaining and the political/legal leverage (Doerre et al 2009;Doellgast et al 2016, 575).…”

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

“…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.…”

The Characteristic Features of Social Dialogue in the Baltics

“…The CEECs are characterized by weaker trade unions and a faster erosion of trade union density, the lack of established employers' associations and a tradition of bipartite, multiemployer, collective bargaining, a lower bargaining coverage and a strong formal tripartism that partly replaces the underdeveloped collective bargaining systems at the sectoral level (Mailand, Due 2004;Woolfson, Sommers 2006;Meardi 2007;Mrozowicki, Van Hootegem 2008;Gonser 2011;Guogis 2014;Mrozowicki 2014). Nevertheless, the tripartism was developed through the pressure of international actors, who had required labor market reforms (Croucher, Rizov 2012).…”