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St Comp Int Dev (2010) 45:3056
DOI 10.1007/s12116-009-9060-1
Published online: 7 January 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
Abstract This article explores the attitudes of trade union organizations to restructuring and privatization of their enterprises to strategic foreign investors in Central and Eastern Europe's biggest steel producers: Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia. Contrary to advocates of insulating technocratic decision-makers from social partners, this article argues that higher quality of democracy and concomitant social dialogue carried out at the level of the sector with union organizations that are autonomous of the government in power (as was the case in the Czech Republic and Poland), are associated with greater restructuring and with support for privatization to strategic foreign investors. In these circumstances, the unions actually pressure reluctant governments to accelerate the privatization process. By contrast, politically motivated capture of individual enterprise-level unions and splitting them from sectoral-level organizations, as occurred in countries with lower quality of democracy (Romania and Slovakia), weakens the autonomous sectoral-level organizations, which are generally supportive of restructuring. Conversely, captured unions remain far more resistant to reform than their counterparts belonging to autonomous sectoral organizations. Thus, higher quality of democracy and concomitant vibrant social dialogue safeguard industrial restructuring.
Keywords Social dialogue . Unions . Industrial restructuring . Privatization . Central and Eastern Europe
Introduction
The role of vested interests, including organized labor, in economic transition of postcommunist states has been the subject of heated debate. On one hand, the neoliberal reformers advocated insulation of technocratic policy makers from the
A. Sznajder Lee (*)
Department of Political Science, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Between Apprehension and Support: Social Dialogue, Democracy, and Industrial Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe
Aleksandra Sznajder Lee
St Comp Int Dev (2010) 45:3056 3131
vested interests, seen to be driven by short-term financial gain and lacking long time horizons (Sachs 1993; Frydman and Rapaczynski 1994). Critics of this approach recommended the opposite: the best way to ensure continued reform was to make the decision-making process inclusive by giving organized labor a stake in the process. This would extend labor's time horizons while making decision-makers more accountable to the public (Stark and Bruszt 1998).
Despite completely different approaches to the means through which economic reform was to be...