Abstract
In 2004, eight Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (Czechia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary) joined the European Union, together with Cyprus and Malta. This was the largest ‘big-bang’ enlargement in the EU’s history. It was followed by the accession of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 and Croatia in 2013. These successive ‘eastern’ enlargements nearly doubled the number of EU Member States. These enlargements posed a significant challenge to the EU’s internal economic and social cohesion. This is not only because per capita GDP and wage levels in the new Member States lagged far behind even the poorest ‘old’ members, but also because of the wide variation in interest representation and governance structures, including industrial relations, across the Member States of the enlarged EU.
Many people in Central and Eastern Europe had hoped that EU enlargement would help to narrow the above-mentioned social and economic gaps, among other things by strengthening industrial relations through coordinated efforts at capacity building and access to EU-level social dialogue. Such hopes did not sufficiently take into account the magnitude of the transformation required, but also the EU’s own vulnerabilities. Twenty years on and, despite respectable levels of GDP growth, the social and wage gap persists, and industrial relations in the region remain fragmented and unstable.
The fact that EU enlargement has not yet resulted in anything like the successful transfer of the ‘European Social Model’ to the east does not mean, however, that it has not shaped the trajectories of Central and Eastern European economic and industrial relations systems in decisive ways. The EU has shaped post-enlargement CEE industrial relations, for example, by providing institutional resources and patterns, shaping regulations, and shifting the balance of power between states, capital and workers to varying extents as a result of the changing political and economic opportunity structure. Enlargement has also had consequences for EU-level unionism, social dialogue and policy-making, among other things by increasing the heterogeneity of perspectives and interests among European governments, as well as among workers and the trade unions representing them. While cooperation within the European labour movement has proved remarkably resilient over the years, it has also been marked by tensions over issues such as a European minimum wage, the regulation of posted work or climate policies.
This special issue, published on the 20th anniversary of the EU’s first eastern enlargement, revisits the early hopes and expectations of this process and analyses its impact on industrial relations in the ‘new’ CEE Member States. We decided against a country-by-country review in order to focus on the issues that, over the years, have formed the core of debates in the literature on industrial relations and European integration. All articles are comparative and cover slightly different geographical areas and sub-regions (the Baltics, the Visegrád countries and south-east Europe), depending on the authors’ expertise. Together, the articles in this special issue provide a comprehensive picture of developments in industrial relations and trade union movements across the region under the influence of EU enlargement.
The first article, by Jan Czarzasty, sets the stage by reviewing the literature on the expected ‘Europeanisation’ of industrial relations in Central and Eastern Europe. Early hopes of institutional convergence are contrasted with real trends in wage growth, union density and influence, and collective bargaining. The author argues that none of the channels that were expected to lead to stronger industrial relations systems in the region – including capacity building through assistance and cooperation programmes, Western multinationals transferring home-country practices to their subsidiaries in CEE countries, the creation of transnational institutions such as European Works Councils, or EU directives requiring expansion of information and consultation rights and social dialogue to the new Member States – managed to exert a lasting institutional impact on industrial relations in the region. Instead, the author observes ongoing deunionisation and decentralisation of collective bargaining, resulting in widespread fragmentation of interest representation and social dialogue. Part of the problem is that the reference image – the ‘European Social Model’ – has itself disintegrated under pressure from successive crises. In the highly transnationalised CEE economies, the potential recovery of industrial relations remains inextricably linked to developments elsewhere in the EU, and to the strengthening of transnational cooperation among key industrial relations actors.
The second article, by Mehtap Akgüç, Marta Kahancová and Jaan Masso, zooms in on one of these mechanisms of transnational cooperation, the European social dialogue, and asks whether social partners in the CEE region have been able to contribute to EU-level social dialogue, as well as to draw on it to improve their bargaining position at national level. Drawing on a survey of perceptions of social partners active in both national and EU-level forums, the authors find that CEE actors indeed perceive the EU-level social dialogue as a resource from which to obtain leverage at the national level. Unions from CEE countries also prefer the EU social dialogue to produce binding decisions – although this position is not shared by many of their western European counterparts – because they see it as a way to compensate for the weakness of national bargaining structures.
Institutional weakness has also made the unions in the region more prone to seeking political alliances in order to achieve their policy goals. Governments, however, have proved to be unreliable partners. The article by Joachim Becker explores two special cases of re-politicisation of industrial relations under neo-nationalist governments and explains the peculiarities of two variants of neo-nationalist regime: neoliberal in Hungary and national-conservative in Poland. Both regimes – Fidesz in Hungary and PiS in Poland – have denounced dependence on foreign capital and proclaimed their intention to create more ‘national’ capitalisms that would retain more value domestically. To that end, both have curtailed the autonomy of economic and industrial relations institutions and replaced them with government-led interventions intended ostensibly to promote national development. While some unions initially saw an opportunity here, the outcomes have been disappointing. In Hungary, Fidesz has tried to draw some unions into its system of ‘national cooperation’ but this has done nothing to stem the onslaught on workers’ rights, including collective bargaining and the right to strike. In Poland, NSZZ Solidarność has been able to extract more concessions, but the union’s close relationship to PiS has led to some tensions with other unions in Poland, as well as internationally.
While the first three articles offer a macro-level picture of developments in CEE industrial relations since EU accession, the next two focus on the ways unions in the region have dealt with specific challenges and opportunities that EU enlargement has opened up. Labour migration from east to west in the EU is one such challenge, and its impact on wages and industrial relations in western Europe has been subject to much research. Much less is known about the impact of labour migration on industrial relations in Central and Eastern Europe, however. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Slovenia and Hungary, Sonila Danaj and Tibor T Meszmann show how the specific form of migration incentivised by EU regulations – temporary, intermediated migration, such as posting or temporary agency work, often involving third-country nationals – created unexpected but widespread pressures on industrial relations in these countries. Above all, it created a new, powerful type of actor – labour intermediaries – that transformed the bargaining landscape, allowing traditional employers to shirk their responsibilities. As a consequence of this transformation sectoral bargaining coordination has been further weakened. The authors also show, however, that significant trade union efforts can at least partially help them to regain influence. In the case of Slovenia, this means investing in cooperation and assistance projects in countries outside the EU. This is a hugely resource-intensive task whose continued success will require more transnational coordination. By contrast, Hungarian trade unions have failed to develop new ways of representing labour market outsiders and influencing the operations of temporary work agencies promoted unilaterally by the government.
How necessary, but also how difficult such coordination is, is best shown by the final research article in the special issue, in which Kairit Kall explores the growth of transnational union organising in the Baltics and Central and Eastern Europe. EU enlargement has facilitated the emergence of variously internationalised union networks across Europe, and many of them have sought to provide capacity-building assistance to counter deunionisation in the new Member States. Given local unions’ lack of resources, such transnational support has been essential to the growth of such initiatives as the Baltic Organizing Academy (later Baltic Organizing Alliance, BOA 2.0) and the Central Europe Organizing Centre (COZZ). These initiatives have proven essential to increasing the number of successful trade union organising campaigns and training of union officials across the region. At the same time, these initiatives have not had much impact in terms of union membership growth overall, and remain vulnerable to unstable funding and disagreements among the participating eastern and western unions.
In addition to the five research articles, this issue also contains a reflection paper by Barbara Surdykowska and Slawomir Adamczyk, experts on the topic with a long history of working for Polish trade union NSZZ Solidarność and representing it within various European forums. It is an honest and critical reflection on the evolution of multilateral union cooperation in Europe, in which they argue that, despite the emergence of different channels of cooperation at company, sectoral and national level in Europe, the results have remained meagre, as national unions continue to guard their prerogatives in the ‘core’ areas such as wages and working conditions. Their position echoes the finding of Akgüç et al. that the CEE unions seek binding EU-level agreements as an antidote to their own weaknesses, an expectation bound to be disappointed by their western European counterparts whose history and preferences lean towards a higher level of regulatory autonomy. Their article nevertheless ends on a hopeful note that perhaps new challenges, such as companies’ resort to machine learning technology (so-called ‘AI’) and its effects on the world of work, but also deep demographic change – will be met by a more unified transnational response, because no national unions seem prepared to tackle them alone.
In putting this special issue together, we hope to provide something like a reference volume, summing up developments at the end of the first two decades of CEE membership of the EU, and establishing a benchmark for future debate. We also hope that it can help to shift the debate away from simplistic discussions of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of institutional transplantation towards a systematic study of different mechanisms of influence, tensions within them, and possible unintended consequences of this epochal attempt to integrate socially and economically disparate European regions. In that sense, we believe that the work assembled in this issue can also serve as a research agenda for the future, one that departs from the overly structural perspective that has dominated the study of the Central and Eastern European semi-periphery to highlight unions’ and workers’ agency as political actors and thus raise broader theoretical questions about the transformation of labour politics in Europe.