Labor Relations And Political Change In Eastern Europe

This book offers an insight into the process of transition in Eastern Europe. It provides a comparative analysis of trends in labour relations with and between countries, incorporating country studies which share a common theoretical and empirical framework. The book is intended for postgraduate and professional researchers and for library markets in the fields of industrial relations, sociology of industry/organizations/work, social structure, and politics. Its comparative framework also makes it useful for European studies.

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Why, given political freedom coupled with adverse economic change, has labour been so quiescent since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe? Through the use of case studies, this text explores the extent of these weaknesses and the relationship between labour and politcs in these countries.

Changes in labour relations in Eastern Europe arising from recent political events can only be understood against an explanation of the existing structures and mechanisms of labour relations. This full-length collaborative study - the first in its field - analyses these structures and mechanisms by focusing on the radical reforms undertaken in Bulgaria over the last decade. Using a wealth of case studies, it looks at the action processes within enterprises and at the processes of strategy formulation on a national level in Bulgaria, and compares them with those processses in other Eastern European countries such as Yugoslavia and Hungary.

The substantial political changes in Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989 have been accompanied by the attempted transfer, imposition, and imitation of labour relations practices and mechanisms from other market economies, primarily of Western Europe. This book addresses the extent to whichthese transferred labour-relations institutions are likely to take root. The authors offer a comparative analysis of changing labour relations at national level in a range of countries, and the role of governments, international institutions, trade unions, and other agencies. This is supported byin-depth case studies on the processes of transformation at enterprise level. Drawing on the findings of an international research team, analysis of the change process and recent developments is related to the legacies of the socialist system.

The Politics of Labor in a Global Age is one of the first works to analyse and compare recent shifts in patterns of industrial relations across late-industrializing and post-socialist economies. The volume features original and timely essays on labor relations at national, local, and workplace levels, as economic and politicla actors cope with the similar challenges associated with economic adjustment measures and the impact of 'globalization'. The authors reveal that while globalization has threatened the position of organized labor and prompted business and state elites to accommodate greater labor market flexibility, the legacies of past institutions remain evident in destinctive trends in labor politics within and across late-industrializing and post-socialist settings. The comparisons suggest that globalization is best understood not as a source of covergence but as a set of common pressures that are mediated by specific historical inheritances, that spur varied responses on the part of industrial relations actors, and that facilitate quite diverse institutional outcomes.