The Role of the State in Central and Eastern European Industrial Relations: The Case of Minimum Wages
Governments in Central and Eastern Europe are dominant players in the field of industrial relations, acting in a liberalization dilemma between the needs of further state regulation to compensate the shortcomings of autonomous self-regulation by social actors and the demands of liberalized markets in the enlarged EU. Compared with the different types of industrial relation systems in Western Europe, a transitional model with specific etatist features has emerged. This becomes particularly evident when analyzing the decision-making process in Tripartite Councils and its function in determining national minimum wages. The article underlines the recent trends of differentiation and convergence of such pay principles as well as urgent tasks of the state to regulate the unsolved problems of poverty, labor markets and labor standards.
The quality of industrial relations and the Lisbon strategy
Industrial relations and the Lisbon reform agenda are interwoven. The Lisbon Strategy has entered the agenda of the social partners at all levels: European, national, in sectors and in companies. The use of instruments — law, collective agreements with and without binding effects, guidelines and benchmarking — varies and generally there is a tendency to combine hard and soft instruments, and less binding regulation, allowing more flexibility in implementation under diverse conditions. Differences in industrial relation regimes across Member States are visible in employment outcomes, the capacities of industrial relations actors and the contribution of the social dialogue process. In addition to differences in capacities, however, the willingness of unions and employers’ association to ‘buy into’ the dialogue process and the Lisbon agenda may be the overriding factor explaining a successful contribution.
Solidarity’s Abandonment of Worker Councils: Redefining Employee Stakeholder Rights in Post-socialist Poland
This paper examines the rejection of employee councils by Poland’s trade union Solidarity. In the historical institutional analysis in the first part of this paper, Solidarity’s early commitment to employee councils is traced to the evolution of ideas about economic reform that predominated in the union leadership. The impact of these dominant ideas are examined in the second half of the paper which relates Solidarity’s abandonment of employee councils to broadly held beliefs about the limited rights of employee stakeholders. Together, the qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrates how trade unions’ strategies and their ideological underpinnings have shaped Poland’s postwar industrial relations institutions.