Central and Eastern European trade unions after the EU enlargement

Post-enlargement labour migration

Looking at the influences on domestic labour markets, intensive labour mobility from CEE to the ‘old’ EU Member States caused unemployment rates in the CEE Member States to fall (Kahanec and Zimmermann, 2010). As a consequence, labour shortages emerged in some countries and sectors. Migration also had an effect on union membership in the CEE countries. Meardi (2012: 97) found that Slovakia and Lithuania were the countries with the highest number of migrants and the biggest fall in union membership. In contrast, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia experienced the lowest migration rates and also lost fewer union members. In the Visegrád region, trade unions managed to mobilize against migration of health care workers through collective bargaining in Slovakia and public protests in Poland (Kaminska and Kahancová, 2011). In Poland, unions launched massive protests and strikes for wage increases to stem the outward migration flows. Although they failed to obtain bargaining recognition from the government, unions managed to secure wage increases and increase public awareness of their ability to mobilize for collective action. In Slovakia, unions took action within the functioning bargaining system and achieved wage increases. In this way they confirmed their capacity to use the existing bargaining institutions to shape working conditions. Hungarian trade unions did not face high migration of health care workers and failed to utilize this opportunity to strengthen their own capacity for action (Kaminska and Kahancová, 2011).

While evidence directly related to union action concerning migration is not available from other CEE countries, some countries saw unions mobilizing their organizational resources to obtain wage rises and improve health care budgets. This was notably the case in Romania (Adascalitei and Muntean, 2014) and Estonia (Bogdanoski et al., 2014). In Romania, through a series of hospital-level strikes, health care unions were able to obtain tangible benefits. In Estonia, health care unions mobilized against low wages and worsening working conditions and obtained wage rises. Despite an expected low capacity of unions for such action in Romania and Estonia (see Table 1), evidence confirms that union resources are not completely depleted. Under certain conditions unions are able to mobilize and obtain improvements in working conditions and bargaining institutions.

Cross-border capacity building

Enlargement stimulated cross-border support for capacity building through, for example, CEE representatives’ involvement in the European Works Councils (EWCs) of multinational firms, integration of CEE trade unions in EU-level sectoral social dialogue committees and case-specific support for capacity building in CEE countries. Cross-border initiatives on capacity building were widespread in the early 2000s in preparation for EU enlargement, and regained prominence after the crisis when unions sought to strengthen their transnational resources for domestic action. In the 2000s, Belgian, Dutch and German trade unions have been particularly active in developing cross-border regional councils and training initiatives for CEE unions. ¹ Moreover, the early 2000s PHARE programme helped to improve structural conditions for union presence and establish platforms for sectoral social dialogue in countries with weak sectoral organization, including Hungary and Romania. In their evaluation of the PHARE programme in Hungary, Andersen et al. (2004: 3) conclude that ‘[t]he social partner organisations must enhance their own resources e.g. by raising funds, preferably through membership fees and launching targeted strategies for recruitment of new members. Further, it is important to share information and integrate organisational resources among social partner organisations.’ This argument ties capacity building to internal union resources, but stresses the structural membership base as the main determinant of such resources.

In the Baltic states, unions sought cross-border support for capacity building in their wage demands among others for teachers and transport workers in Estonia. In April 2012, the Nordic Transport Workers’ Federation and partner organizations announced a grant of over €120,000 for their Estonian counterparts in a bid to help them implement new operating methods and recruit new union members. This action indicates a strengthening of cross-border union cooperation within the EU, with unions in western and Nordic EU Member States realizing that the best remedy against social dumping is support for capacity building for CEE unions in wage negotiations.

Finally, cross-border resource building has developed as a regional initiative in Bulgaria and Romania, where an interregional council representing workers from both countries has been established (Eurofound, 2013a). The aim is to boost employment and ensure free labour market access between the two countries through joint trade union initiatives. The proposal includes monitoring of legal changes and compliance in the border regions’ labour markets, protecting migrant workers and exchanging good practices to strengthen local union resources in the border regions. This focus puts trade unions in a position to control labour market issues. Moreover, to protect migrants, unions called for strengthened bilateral cooperation agreements with their counterparts in other EU countries. Agreements have already been signed between the unions in Bulgaria and in Cyprus, Germany, Greece and the United Kingdom (Eurofound, 2012b).

In addition, Romanian unions obtained funding from the EU’s structural funds to provide training for union members in construction and health care to improve their skills and employability (Trif, 2013). Moreover, trade unions in Romania initiated the establishment of social dialogue in rural areas with low union density and no negotiation traditions even without direct international funding and support. Unions demonstrated their inclusive strategy through a variety of instruments, among other things, organizing, service provision, empowerment and raising awareness. The project encompassed around 550 events, involved about 17,000 individuals and created 260 civil society partnerships in social dialogue (Eurofound, 2014).

While the above evidence suggests a general openness on the part of CEE unions to cross-border support, integration into EU-level social dialogue structures and recognition of this opportunity for domestic union action remains slow (see Meardi, 2012). Reliance on European legislation as a resource for domestic action still has only a minor role in framing union strategies in country-specific conditions. The long-established opinion of union leaders that local opportunities require local resources still persists and is undergoing only slow and path-dependent adjustments. ² This is the case at both company and sectoral levels.

At the company level, cross-border union cooperation as a resource for domestic capacity building is further constrained due to internal competition within multinational firms’ subsidiaries (Bernaciak, 2010; Kahancová, 2010; Raess, 2006). This is one of the reasons why establishing EWC participation of CEE labour representatives as a long-term structural process has not yet been fully accomplished (European Commission, 2013; Meardi, 2012). Therefore, cross-border support for union capacity building possibly has more potential at the national and sectoral levels of union action.

Negotiated responses and social pacts

Within the negotiated responses, a new wave of tripartism and social pacts developed, especially in economic-liberal states without a previous strong tradition of tripartism, including Latvia, Bulgaria and Estonia. In Latvia, the government avoided tripartite negotiations on the state budget after 2004, which culminated in union protests and public demonstrations in 2007. Unions recognized a new opportunity to revive tripartism when the economic situation worsened during the crisis. The Free Trade Union Confederation of Latvia (LBAS), together with the Latvia Employers’ Confederation (LDDK), found government support for their proposals on addressing the crisis-stricken economic and social situation. These efforts resulted in a 2008 social pact on the state budget for 2009. Latvian trade unions did not gain sustainable policy influence, but the revival of tripartism demonstrates that unions were able to seize this window of opportunity to some extent. Their initial strategy changed from public protests to negotiations. It is likely that policy influence in this case did not derive from the unions’ improved structural strength, but from the government’s willingness to consult the social partners.

In Estonia, the government, the Trade Union Confederation (EAKL) and the Employers’ Confederation (ETK) agreed on a pact to maintain jobs and provide effective help for the registered unemployed. Because unemployment kept rising, the government was forced to introduce a new national action plan for 2009–2010. The plan adopted featured less involvement of the social partners than the first pact. Employers welcomed the new plan but trade unions expressed concerns about the possible misuse of subsidies.

A new wave of social pacts emerged in Bulgaria, Croatia and Poland. In Bulgaria, the social partners reached an agreement with the government on an anti-crisis package in 2010. In the context of alarming unemployment rates in Croatia, Croatian trade unions engaged in better coordination and cooperation to negotiate on the new Minimum Wage Act. Unions have already announced a series of actions, including the possibility of a general strike, if there is no change in government policies (Bejaković and Klemenčić, 2014).

Poland, with its persistently low unionization levels and fragmented industrial relations, saw a peak-level social partner agreement on anti-crisis measures signed in 2009. The agreement received public praise and became part of the anti-crisis legislation in 2009. After 2009, the social partners continued to exert pressure to improve the efficiency of the government’s anti-crisis policy. Due to Solidarność criticisms, the anti-crisis legislation was amended again in late 2010. Although the decision on labour involvement in policy-making derived from the government’s discretion instead of a direct strengthening of union capacity for action, this example documents that an initially autonomous agreement between unions and employers can be upgraded to national legislation.

In countries with stronger tripartite traditions, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia, the post-enlargement and post-crisis years saw less impetus to revive social pacts than in the liberal countries. The Czech trade unions demanded their inclusion in post-crisis reform policy-making, but the post-2010 government made it clear that it did not endorse the previous government’s anti-crisis measures agreed with the social partners (Eurofound, 2011b). In Slovenia, the overall number and character of social pacts did not significantly increase in the aftermath of the crisis. The exception was the agreement with trade unions on public sector wage moderation in 2009 as part of the state’s anti-crisis efforts. While public sector wage growth in 2009 should have reached 7.1 per cent instead of the envisaged 9.9 per cent, in 2012 public sector salaries were reduced by 8 per cent (Eurofound, 2012a).

In Slovakia, trade unions enjoyed political support from the post-2006 social-democratic government, which saw trade unions as a valuable political ally (Gould, 2009). Trade unions used this symbiotic relationship to re-establish political power and influence over legislative changes. During the crisis, tripartite platforms for union involvement in policy-making were formally strengthened (Kahancová, 2013). However, the diverging interests of employers (employment flexibility), trade unions (employment security) and the government (employment stability) left the formal tripartite structures without real policy influence. Moreover, unions believed that political support for the ruling party Smer would improve union influence without an additional need to mobilize internal resources for capacity building. As a result, unions lost their influence after the 2010 government change but regained political support again when SMER took office after the 2012 elections. This time, unions remained more cautious and tried to strengthen other resources beyond domestic political support (membership, influence through sectoral and company-level collective bargaining, opening up to cross-border resources). Besides involvement in shaping employment legislation, unions seized opportunities actively to engage in debates on the regulation of temporary work agencies (BARSORIS, 2014). In general, a greater involvement in legislative processes suggests a weakening of unions’ role in traditional wage bargaining. In other words, unions are being squeezed out from their negotiating role not only through market forces and declining demand for union services, but also through the growing importance of legislation for governing employment conditions.

Besides the responses to the crisis via national-level social pact initiatives (or a lack of them), limited evidence exists on negotiated responses at sectoral and company levels. These efforts were found mostly in the Visegrád countries where coordinated bargaining is undergoing decentralization (European Commission, 2013) and unions are experiencing a weakening of their role in national-level policy-making (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012). In Hungary, the weakening of national-level trade unions was partially compensated by union action at the company level. In the automotive industry, several company-level agreements with union approval emerged, adopting crisis adjustment measures, including working time reductions (Neumann and Boda, 2011: 92). Unions at the Audi plant succeeded in striking deals on job security in a trade-off for working time and pay rescheduling. Mercedes launched its Hungarian subsidiary in 2012 with a welcoming attitude towards unions (Eurofound, 2011a). The main motivation behind such initiatives was a shared opinion of unions and employers of the need to protect skilled workers and avoid dismissals.

In contrast to the Hungarian evidence, unions were less successful in protecting jobs in company-level action in other Visegrád countries. When FIAT in Poland announced 1500 job losses in 2012, after initial opposition unions accepted the redundancy plan (Eurofound, 2013b). In Slovakia’s biggest steel company US Steel Košice, trade unions agreed to trade off workers’ pay increases for a working time increase and a 12 per cent reduction in workforce size. Although presented as a compromise after four months of negotiations, this result reflects the unions’ failure to reverse the company’s job cutting efforts (Eurofound, 2012c). ³ In other large Slovak companies in the automotive and electronics sectors, trade unions continued to use collective bargaining as the main instrument for adopting anti-crisis measures after 2009. While this effort strengthened the unions’ bargaining capacity and bargaining institutions, it also contributed to the rise of a dual labour market. Bargaining on behalf of the stable workforce, one side effect of union action was a gradual exclusion of temporary (agency) workers from benefits and job security (Kahancová, 2013). It took the trade unions three more years to realize that representing agency workers would enhance union capacity in collective bargaining and legislative influence (BARSORIS, 2014).

Finally, in the Czech Republic, unions fought for a legislative basis for crisis recovery in the glass industry. While the industry recovered from the crisis and wages have begun to rise, the collapse of large companies seriously affected employment, union membership and workers’ uncertainty after dismissals. Nevertheless, the glass industry union pushed for legislative amendments to avoid similar situations in the future (Eurofound, 2012d; Eurofound, 2008). ⁴

Besides the Visegrád countries, unions made company-level concessions also in the Baltic states and in Romania. In Estonia, despite the general union strategy to maintain existing collective agreements, unions agreed to bargain company-level concessions (Kallaste and Woolfson, 2013). New provisions postponed wage increases and bonuses, and introduced consolidating measures on wages and employment. In Romania, the FGS Familia construction union worked out representativeness guidelines to equip local unions with additional resources and helped them in renegotiating company-level agreements. As a result, some provisions improved on the legal stipulations, including the agreement in a construction multinational on wages and working conditions during a lockout in December 2011 (Trif, 2013).

To summarize, trade unions across CEE did seize opportunities during the crisis and helped in the design and implementation of anti-crisis measures. CEE trade unions are thus capable of negotiated responses even in hostile institutional conditions with little societal support and a declining membership base. At the same time, union capacities to defend the substantive results of negotiated responses at the national, sectoral and company levels remain contested. This is because union influence is increasingly conditioned by the extent of political support and employers’ openness to labour inclusion in decision-making.

Union organizing, coordination and mergers

Developments in the post-crisis years brought union efforts to organize new as well as increasingly important groups in the labour market, including women and workers with non-standard and often precarious work contracts. Unions also sought to strengthen their capacities through mergers. These trends were most pronounced in the Visegrád group of countries. In Poland, Solidarność defended women’s rights at a large food-processing company and trained shop-floor union representatives to fight sexual harassment (Bernaciak et al., 2014). The focus on women’s rights also helped union organizing in predominantly female occupations. In Poland the All-Poland Union of Nurses and Midwives (OZZPiP) emerged from bottom-up initiatives and attracted nearly 80,000 members (Bernaciak et al., 2014). Similarly, nurses and midwives created their own trade union in Slovakia (OZSaPA) in 2012.

Across the whole region, unions increasingly recognized the opportunity to organize non-standard workers. In all three Baltic states, unions tried to protect the jobs and working conditions of precarious workers and undertook some organizing efforts in cooperation with their Nordic counterparts (Bernaciak et al., 2014: 24). The Slovak unions also changed their strategy vis-à-vis precarious workers despite contributing to labour market dualization by protecting standard full-time employees after the crisis (see above).

Union mergers have not been common since the mid-2000s, but the opposition to crisis-induced austerity measures seems to have motivated recent mergers without specific reference to particular CEE country groups (Bernaciak et al., 2014). Poland saw its three major union confederations unite in protests against labour market ‘flexibility’ and anti-crisis policies. In Lithuania and also in Romania national confederations shared their opinions against austerity measures and developed their strategies and protests accordingly. In Hungary, known for its fragmented union structure, three of the six union confederations (MSZOSZ, ASZSZ and SZEF) launched a merger process in 2013 (Bernaciak et al., 2014).

Capacity-strengthening efforts are also reported from Romania and Bulgaria. While Romanian unions focused on bottom-up capacity building, in 2012 Bulgaria’s Confederation of Independent Trade Unions addressed the need to strengthen union capacities through a centrally adopted five-year programme. The programme aims at central organizational changes and consolidation of 35 fragmented union branches.

While most of the above union initiatives derive from recognizing opportunities and acting upon them, we argue that the results of trade union action do not depend only on the unions’ own capacity to recognize opportunities. In a complex environment, unions are exposed to interaction with other actors, most importantly governments and employers (see Avdagic, 2005). Power relations between these actors shape the final outcome and efficiency of union initiatives. While some cases demonstrate union success in capacity building and policy inclusion, there are cases when unions failed to achieve their goals because of diverging interests and power asymmetries vis-à-vis employers and the government.

Mobilizing against austerity

Besides negotiated responses, the post-crisis years saw a revival of union-led labour mobilization in the form of strikes and protests. Bulgaria and Romania have a stronger labour mobilization history than the Visegrád and the Baltic states (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012). In these countries, trade unions were more likely to engage in strikes and protests also after the crisis. In Bulgaria, workers at the largest coalmines engaged in a one-week strike in 2012. After lengthy talks, unions and the management agreed to change working conditions and pay bonuses of approximately €1.07m (Thomson Reuters, 2012).

In Romania, the preference for mobilization instead of bargaining derived from legal changes on union representativeness and the validity of new collective agreements (Trif, 2014). As a result, public discontent with austerity measures produced a large union-led protest in 2010 against cuts in pensions and salaries. Earlier in 2010, the Romanian national trade union confederations set up a national crisis committee to harmonize the trade unions’ response to the government anti-crisis measures, especially those included in the agreement with the IMF, the European Commission and the World Bank (Eurofound, 2010). After the unions accused the government of ignoring social dialogue, over 60,000 union members and supporters protested against the proposed cuts in public sector wages, pensions, unemployment benefits and child allowances. The five largest trade union confederations united in calling these measures socially unacceptable. Moreover, trade unions formulated alternative austerity measures targeting the state apparatus to face the consequences of the crisis, including downsizing, wage cuts and pension freezes (Trif, 2013). This union strategy proved to be successful in achieving a government declaration not to endorse the IMF’s austerity measures without a consensus with the social partners (Trif, 2014).

After 2010, when the effects of the crisis continued to dominate political discourse in the public sector, trade unions engaged in a new wave of political action, protest and strikes in health care, education, justice and other public services.

Unions in the education sector opted for strikes and protests also in the Baltic states where the expected union capacity for mobilization remained low (see Table 1). In the aftermath of the crisis, mobilization turned out to be an influential instrument for attaining union goals. In Estonia, unions in the education sector protested after the government’s failure to acknowledge union demands concerning wage increases for teachers. Teachers’ basic salaries had not increased since 2008 and by 2012 wages in education stood 30 percent below the national average. The government rejected repeated calls from the teachers’ union for a 20 per cent wage rise. In response, unions decided to launch a three-day national strike, which was the first of its kind since 2004. With over 17,000 participating teachers, this event was the largest industrial action in the history of Estonia and the government agreed to a 15 per cent rise in teachers’ salaries. The strike gained support from other sectors and from international partners. Health care and transport workers staged a solidarity strike, drawing attention to legal changes in the collective bargaining law. The Estonian union response to public sector austerity shows that with strong cross-sectoral cooperation and international support, unions are able to gain concessions even when they are in a weak structural position and a hostile political environment. ⁵

The growing relevance of mobilization is also obvious in countries with a legacy of negotiations and institutional support for labour involvement. This predominantly concerns the Visegrád countries. In Hungary, public sector trade unions protested against pension cuts for the armed forces, police officers and firemen. In Poland, the firemen’s trade union voiced dissatisfaction with working time regulations. The Czech Republic and Slovakia both saw severe protests and strikes in their health care sectors when doctors, coordinated via trade unions in each country, threatened to resign from their jobs if wage rises were not adopted. Possibly facing enormous shortages of hospital doctors, the governments in both countries agreed to substantial wage increases. While this action motivated other occupational groups – nurses in Slovakia – to stand up for their wage claims through public protests, it also weakened the traditional collective bargaining channels in the health care sector. Moreover, the shift in union action towards legislative instruments left the largest occupational groups in health care without bargaining coverage (BARSORIS, 2014). In other words, excessive reliance on legislation as the most important resource for union influence caused the replacement of collective bargaining institutions by state regulation and market regulation. Health care unions played an active role in the process by which they were squeezed out by legislation without a simultaneous strengthening of other capacities, for example, membership base or bargaining legitimacy.

In early 2015 the scene of union-led public sector protests is dominated by dissatisfaction and demands for wage increases in the justice sector in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Trade unions realize that victory is more likely through protests than traditional bargaining channels, which further weakens the legitimacy of traditional collective labour relations. Moreover, this trend is shifting the efforts of capacity building to new instruments of union action, including mobilization, public protests and political lobbying.