Catherine Spieser

Collective bargaining and reforms to hospital healthcare provision: A comparison of the UK, Italy and France:

Reforms inspired by the ‘new public management’ approach have changed the provision of hospital healthcare and challenged established arrangements for governing the workforce. We identify four main reform processes in three countries, and examine their impact on collective bargaining and administrative and statutory mechanisms of workforce governance. Although the extent and nature of reforms play a role in the changes to workforce governance, political choices and the interests and responses of organized employers and trade unions intervene to shape outcomes.

The Mobilization That was Not: Explaining the Weak Politicization of the Issue of Unemployment in Poland

By combining mass unemployment, a high level of restrictive changes in policies addressing the unemployed, and a low level of political and social conflict connected to these issues, Poland appears as a puzzling case in the European landscape. During 1989–1990, the revolutions that brought to an end decades of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe were accompanied by a wave of hope for rapid material gains from economic restructuring. Similar expectations for an improvement in well-being accompanied European Union (EU) accession fifteen years later. In this context, the rise of unemployment, which is often associated with a failure of government policies, could be interpreted as a nonachievement of the new political regime.