Strategies of Disruption: Factory Unions Facing Asset-Strippers in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine

Abstract

The author uses ethnographic fieldwork to examine what forms of disruption trade unions use in resisting asset-strippers at four factories in the metal sector of post-Communist Romania and Ukraine. He shows how understanding disruption as differentiating among various targets and protest actions, and adapting actions to targets, allows researchers to make sense of how, when employers are uninterested in production, unions can effectively protest even if they cannot strike. In addition, he discusses how in many cases in Eastern Europe the search to create disruption is complicated by the persistence of nonadversarial forms of trade unionism coupled with employer actions that exploit such forms.