European Journal of Industrial Relations

This article provides an overview of recent changes in the former Soviet Union and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. State regulation has been reduced, both through privatization and through the relaxation of statutory prescriptions, though new `framework' legislation has been implemented. The former commitment to full employment has been abandoned and unemployment has risen, often dramatically. Trade unions - often the `reformed' successors of the old official institutions - often retain significant nominal representative status, but have little effective regulatory power. Though most countries have introduced peak-level tripartite machinery, real decision-making takes place at company level where management is in the driving seat.

Works councils were introduced in Hungary in 1992, partly on the model of the German industrial relations system. The objective was to resolve a crisis of industrial relations in the transition to a market economy: the fragmentation of trade unions, the vacuum of institutionalization, and the representation gap for non-union workers. Drawing on case study research, this article evaluates the experience to date and concludes that the `artificial' imposition of an unfamiliar structure of employee representation has been only partly successful, though arguably contributing to the consolidation of industrial relations in a multi-union environment.

This article examines continuities in the marginalization of trade unions in Hungary. Beneath the surface of party-led, bureaucratic organizations of the `command economy', strong groups of workers engaged in informal wage bargaining with management. In the 1980s a special internal contracting system offered core workers the opportunity to carry out collective wage negotiations, circumventing the formal trade union channels of representation. In the post-communist era, rights of union organization and collective bargaining are formally assured, but these institutions are not the main determinants of wages, hours, terms and conditions of employment. In particular, after privatization some former state enterprises introduced Employee Share Ownership Programmes. Employees who are share-owners gain higher income through dividends and enjoy better job security and preferential terms and conditions of employment. In these companies, distinctions between core and periphery are now disguised as property relations, displaying surprising similarities to the 1980s.

This article examines the changing approach of the Czechoslovak (and then Czech) labour movement: from trying to reconcile support for free market reform with the defence of democracy and workers' rights, to a clearer position of workers' interest representation. Union radicalization was spurred first by successes in defending workers' rights at state level immediately after the Velvet Revolution, then increasingly by polarization forced by the entrenchment of a confident right-wing state. While the first five years of post-communist trade unionism produced apparent social consensus and union quiescence, making the Czech Republic an island of `social peace' within a much more turbulent central and eastern Europe, 1995 appeared to mark a turning of the tide towards greater conflict and opposition.

This article employs institutional theory to analyse the remodelling of employment relations after the transformation from socialism to a market-based economy. Such transformation is subject to constraints deriving from institutional legacies which include both structures and ideational forces, and which create path dependence. We report empirical research on employment relations within Bulgarian enterprises, and show how path dependency has interacted with intentional design. We identify the structural and cultural residues that mould post-socialist employment relations. The result is a system of industrial relations that combines conscious redesign along a continental European model of corporatist interest representation and collective bargaining with institutional residues from socialism which have themselves mutated with the collapse of traditional institutional structures after the revolution.