State and Labor in Post-Communist Europe: What Difference Did Democracy Make?

Rare exceptions notwithstanding, communist legacies are typically assumed to have negative effects on the development of civil society.  This is evident in typical views of post-communist labor: even though labor is the largest single component of civil society, it is also seen as uniformly weak and passive in part because of the legacy of the communist system trade unionism and the atomization of the workforce.  Yet, this state of affairs can no longer be largely attributed to the communist inheritance in Central and Eastern Europe, where democratic institutions have been in place for nearly a quarter century. Moreover, adjusting for the heightened expectations of the early years of transition, we can begin to see small differences in the extent to which labor has been able to make a difference in aspects of social policy and in the manner in which states have sought to pursue labor incorporation in the midst of economic liberalization.  Using a paired comparison of the Czech Republic and Poland, this paper advances three claims.  First, to the extent that organized labor in the two countries appear to be "passive" by comparison to counterparts in Western Europe, this is more the result of a mismatch between heightened initial expectations and the pragmatic choices by actors under conditions of extreme uncertainty and duress associated with the early years of transition. Second, communist legacies encompass organizational elements that have previously been discounted but that have the greatest impact over time in relation to the ability of labor to exert some influence on the state and stem the loss of membership.  In this regard, the CMKOS' inherited organizational structure and resources - as opposed to the deep divisions between Solidarity and OPZZ in Poland - helped to exert at least some pressure at crucial moments of the initial transition.   Finally, as the institutional environment has become more predictable, diverse strategies have come into play, depending on the ability of labor to maintain a united front and build stable alliances with political parties and bureaucratic actors in the wider political arena. The differences that have emerged as a result of the interaction of these mechanisms can be found in the processes and outcomes of contestation on labor code revisions. The differences are not large, but they are indicative of possibilities that are difficult to anticipate without adjusting our expectations in accordance with more appropriate comparative referents, such as earlier efforts to incorporate labor in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan (rather than contemporary examples of labor assertiveness in post-industrial OECD countries).