Marta Kahancová

Emigration and labour shortages: An opportunity for trade unions in the New Member States?

Emigration from the post-socialist states which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 has reduced unemployment rates and created shortages of some skills. This should provide opportunities for trade unions to improve their situation, by facilitating union organizing and strengthening their bargaining position. Have unions grasped these opportunities? We adopt an actor-centred perspective to examine their strategies and actions in the public health care sector — strongly affected by migration — in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. We argue that variation in union strategies depends mainly on the interplay of union capacities and state strategies. Slovak unions used the established sectoral bargaining system to obtain wage increases and to consolidate the bargaining machinery. In contrast, Polish unions gained wage increases through industrial action. Hungarian health care unions mostly failed to seize migration-related opportunities.

One Company, Four Factories: Coordinating Employment Flexibility Practices with Local Trade Unions

This article reports a case study of employment flexibility patterns in four factories of a multinational company in western and central Europe. There is remarkable variation in these patterns, which structural and institutional factors alone do not explain. Rather, the interests of management and local unions, and the character of their mutual interaction, are central for workplace employment practices. In factories with cooperative industrial relations, unions are extensively involved in employment flexibility even if management lacks a legal obligation or economic incentives to do so. In consequence, the company policy is neither a straightforward adaptation to host country institutions, nor a simple diffusion of corporate ‘best practice’.

Analysing Employment Practices in Western European Multinationals: Coordination, Industrial Relations and Employment Flexibility in Poland

Despite the fact that multinational companies (MNCs) in Central Eastern Europe significantly contribute to employment growth in the region, qualitative knowledge about diffusion of employment practices in this region, and about coordination of MNCs with local labour market actors and institutions is still limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by underlining the coordination between MNCs, local actors, and international actors in shaping employment practices, their diffusion from headquarters to the workplace level, and their adaptation to local conditions in Poland. The goal is to explain MNC-driven adjustment to local conditions in employment practices of production workers and industrial relations through which this goal can be achieved. To explain this, we apply several coordination games between management and trade unions in the empirical part of the paper.We argue that the MNCs corporate intention to utilise local conditions, the interactive coordination of the factory management with the local trade union, and an underdeveloped international coordination of trade unions within the MNC are the main factors explaining the specific local employment practices and industrial relations instead of their diffusion from MNC headquarters or other subsidiaries.

Hospital Bargaining in the Wake of Management Reforms: Hungary and Slovakia Compared

This article analyses the impact of new public management on employment relations in public healthcare in Hungary and Slovakia. We argue that hospital corporatization – a process which changed the ownership structure and management of public hospitals without privatization – created an opportunity for institutional change in collective bargaining. However, the interaction between hospital owners and managements, the state and trade unions accounts for the absence of major institutional change. Instead, corporatization helped maintain bargaining coordination in Slovakia and bargaining fragmentation in Hungary.