Stephen Crowley

Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian and Ukrainian Workers from the End of the Soviet Union to the Post-Communist Transformations

Well after the disintegration of the Communist Party and the Soviet state--and through several years of economic collapse--industrial workers in almost every sector of the former Soviet Union have remained quiescent and the same ineffective and unpopular trade unions still hold a virtual monopoly on workers representation. Why? While many argue that labor is a central variable in the development of economic and political systems, little is known about workers in the states of the former Soviet Union since the fall of Communism. In a comparative study of two groups of industrial workers--the coal miners and steelworkers--at the end of the Soviet era, Stephen Crowley sheds light on where these workers have been and where they are going. Coal miners in the final years of the Soviet Union effectively organized and led strikes which supported the end of Communism, even though their heavy subsidies would be threatened by capitalism. Steel workers, in contrast, did not effectively organize and strike. This pattern has continued under the new governments, with the coal miners effectively organized and seeking protection from the worst consequences of marketization, while the steel workers remain weakly organized despite deteriorating economic conditions. Based on extensive on-site research including interviews with miners and steelworkers, labor leaders and plant managers, Crowley develops a detailed picture of the conditions under which workers organize. His findings have application beyond the conditions of post-Communist Russia and Ukraine to other societies undergoing fundamental change. This book will be of interest to sociologists and political scientists interested in the role of labor in transitional societies, the patterns of organization of labor, as well as area specialists. Stephen Crowley is Associate Professor of Political Science, Oberlin College.

Monotowns and the political economy of industrial restructuring in Russia

During the 2008–2009 economic crisis, Russias monotowns – one-industry towns left from the Soviet era – gained widespread attention as potential sources of social protest and unrest. Will such worries resurface under current economic conditions? While fears about monotowns were exaggerated during the last economic crisis, Russias leadership has reason to remain concerned. Despite the dramatic transformations of the last two decades, Russias post-Soviet industrial landscape has largely survived intact, leaving a significant number of monotowns with unprofitable enterprises in a precarious position. Yet given its emphasis on social stability, we can expect the government to continue subsidies, both explicit and hidden, that seek to maintain employment and avoid social conflict, but that preserve the countrys inefficient industrial geography.

Working Through The Past: Labor and Authoritorian Legacies in Comparative Perspective

Excerpt] Democratization in the developing and post-communist world has yielded limited gains for labor. Explanations for this phenomenon have focused on the effect of economic crisis and globalization on the capacities of unions to become influential political actors and to secure policies that benefit their members. In contrast, the contributors to Working through the Past highlight the critical role that authoritarian legacies play in shaping labor politics in new democracies, providing the first cross-regional analysis of the impact of authoritarianism on labor, focusing on East and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Legacies from the predemocratic era shape labor’s present in ways that both limit and enhance organized labor’s power in new democracies. Assessing the comparative impact on a variety of outcomes relevant to labor in widely divergent settings, this volume argues that political legacies provide new insights into why labor movements in some countries have confronted the challenges of neoliberal globalization better than others.

Russia The Reemergence of Class in the Wake of the First “Classless” Society

Class structure, class inequality, and class analysis are central to understanding contemporary Russian politics and society. And yet Russians themselves—from social scientists, to political leaders, to everyday Russians—have struggled to come to grips with the concept of class, which became a taboo topic following the collapse of communism. In recent years, that has started to change. Russian social scientists have placed great emphasis on defining the Russian “middle class,” in a search both for a non-Marxist conception of class and for a social group with the potential to lead Russia toward a more liberal future. Yet the middle class concept remains fuzzy, and the political aspirations for the group have been only partially realized. Meanwhile, much of the rest of Russian society retains a more traditional view of class and class conflict, as reflected in various political struggles and even in popular culture, such as Russian film.Class structure, class inequality, and class analysis are central to understanding contemporary Russian politics and society. And yet Russians themselves—from social scientists, to political leader...

Labor Protests and Their Consequences in Putin’s Russia

How have Russia’s workers responded in the face of Russia’s current economic challenges? In this article we explore changes in Russian labor protest over time, through the boom and bust cycles of the Russian economy. Relying on independent Russian databases, we examine evidence of a significant increase in labor protest in recent years, which also reveals that, despite apparent changes in the prosperous 2000s, Russian labor relations and protest are returning to past patterns. The protests are often spontaneous and their likeliness to spread stems less from union support than from policies that impact workers and others as a single category, such as the Platon road-tax system and its impact on truckers. Russia’s truckers also illustrate the potential for economic protests to become politicized. In view of this potential, Russia’s leadership appears to be reinforcing past practices such as avoiding mass layoffs, but such steps may harm long-term economic growth, itself a cause of protest.

10. Transformation without Transition: China’s Maoist Legacies in Comparative Perspective

The politics of Chinese labor and the interaction between China’s authoritarian political system, dualistic labor market institutions, and “state corporatist” industrial relations are issues of incredible importance. Chinese labor trends not only affect outcomes in China but also in other countries with which China is actively engaged economically, through trade and foreign direct investment and through competition for the same. Many studies of Chinese labor politics have increased our general knowledge of the topic and explicated important facets of labor relations in post-1978 China for those unfamiliar with Chinese political institutions (Walder 1986; Lu and Perry 1997; Lee 1998, 2007; Chan 2001; Gallagher 2005; Frazier 2002, 2010; Hurst 2010; Solinger 1999). However, China’s trajectory from a relatively isolated, state-socialist, planned economy to the second largest economy in the world with the largest inflows of foreign direct investment in the developing world by far and diverse patterns of regional development and ownership have remained largely left out of analysis of labor issues in comparative politics. Scholars of Latin American labor politics have frequently expanded their sights to cross-national comparisons, especially to cases in East and Southeast Asia, but differences of regime type and transition paths have generally excluded both China and Vietnam from most studies (Haggard and Kaufmann 2008; but see Chan and Norland 1999 on the China-Vietnam comparison). The varieties of capitalism literature (Hall and Soskice 2001) has similarly not been used frequently to explore the Chinese case (but see McNally

Coping with Social Change: Life Strategies of Workers in Poland’s New Capitalism

fights, the author sees it bearing a cosmopolitan outlook, whether forced or not, with a high degree of tolerance for ethnic and religious differences. This is an ingenious project that takes one building as the empirical focus as well as unit of analysis to tell of the larger processes of globalization beyond the conventional core-periphery dichotomy. This approach has all the merits discussed above but it also generates some tensions, gaps, and questions. Globalization is a multi-faceted phenomenon politically, economically, and socially, which entails very different explanations regarding the push and pull factors, the contexts, and the agents. For instance, the motivations behind the traders from Africa, asylum seekers from South Asia, former Gurkhas from Nepal, and tourists from all over may be similar but are also distinctly different from the workers. The author’s attempt to subsume all the complexities under an overarching driving force of neo-liberalism at the end is not quite doing justice to the more nuanced analysis throughout the book, unless Mathews chooses instead to focus on those who travel to trade and to work under the sway of capitalism. Even so, it still does not quite explain how the goal of money-seeking, which has been an ancient driving force for worldwide migration in human history, is giving rise to the particular form of globalization we see today, in terms of, for instance, ethnicity, class, place, and time. And it also does not quite direct us to understand the processes in terms of gender. For example, why are almost all of the adventurous traders from Africa male and why does the place appear to have a predominantly male presence? What lurks behind the claim about neo-liberalism is perhaps a potentially more intricate theory about globalization. Despite the shortfalls, Ghetto is a captivating book that has covered wide grounds and makes a very interesting, engaging, and rewarding read. Its contributions to the academic discussion on globalization are more than notable. Coping with Social Change: Life Strategies of Workers in Poland’s New Capitalism, by Adam Mrozowicki. Leuven, BE: Leuven University Press, 2011. 284pp.

Workers after Workers' States: Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe

65.00 paper. ISBN: 9789058678652.