Sunday, March 16, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
This paper examines the transition process from a centrally planned to a free market economy that took place in Poland in the Hard Coal Mining Sector (HCMS) between 1989 and 2007. I investigate to what extend the logic of objective economic necessity (profitability) was supplemented by additional rhetorical strategies, informational policies and other non-material incentives aimed at overcoming the resistance to the restructuring process and especially to its most conspicuous element – unemployment. I examine the main currents of public discourse on the political economy and how they pertained to the groups adversely affected by the negative consequences of the transition, including the Silesian miners. I argue that the HCMS was a socioeconomic arena where all the phenomena originating from postcommunist legacies and the subsequent post-1989 cultural vacuum were felt more directly than anywhere else in Poland and possibly in the entire postcommunist region. I attempt to estimate to what extend the post-1989 governments engaged in rhetorical and informational endeavors that would explain to the miners threatened with unemployment where this threat originated from and how it could be turned into an advantage. I suggest that the extraordinary intensity of various postcommunist legacies accumulated in Silesia rendered such efforts both highly relevant and difficult to implement. Finally, I look at the scale and kinds social welfare benefits which have eventually been negotiated as a safety cushion for those leaving the HCMS and I analyze how this outcome fits into the bargaining framework of the political economy of a postcommunist transformation.
