Saturday, March 15, 2014
Empire (Omni Shoreham)
The peculiarities of East European labor have been the topic of a heated debate over the last two decades. By now, macro-level studies of labor relations in the region agree that trade unions are a weak actor. The main assumption of this literature is that labor is a unitary actor. However, the reality of industrial relations in Eastern Europe is that, over the last two decades, trade unions underwent a process of decentralization that shifted power from the center to local and regional organizations. This paper takes the decentralization hypothesis seriously and asks what factors influence the fortunes of trade unions at the plant level as well as what strategies they used for effectively representing workers´ rights in front of employers. It argues that, by concentrating on the plant level union activities we can go beyond the oversimplification of considering labor as a unitary actor and uncover variation between the strategies that unions use for defending workers’ rights. It finds that plant level unions use a variety of strategies to defend the interests of their members: from legal action, threats to cease production to plant occupations and protests. Further, it shows that a key factor that impacted union power at the plant level was the preservation of welfare entitlements after privatization. To support these claims, the paper brings evidence from four Ukrainian factories in steel and automotive industries.
