Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

enterprise collapse of this sort could do untold damage to the labourmanagement
movement in transition economies; a nation-wide version
of the reputation of employee-owned firms gained from the
so-called ‘Benn co-operatives’ in the UK in the 1970s, and the Scottish
Daily News (see, for example, Bradley and Gelb, 1980).
9.4 Conclusions
I have argued that the transition process creates an exciting opportunity
for those interested in the development of an employee owned sector.
This is because, as a consequence of mass privatization, many workers
in Central and Eastern Europe now own shares in the companies where
they work: taken together, this often forms a majority or strategic stake.
However, this is not enough to ensure that labour-management
emerges as a significant form in these countries. The employee ownership
which has developed is individual and highly dispersed: there are
no mechanisms to convert ownership into control and many of the
firms are non-viable. I have argued that the opportunity for labour-management
should nonetheless be seized, at least in (probably a minority
of) the firms that have a long-term potential. But to succeed, we need to
learn the lessons from successful employee owned sectors in Western
Europe and North America to formulate the legal framework, institutional
rules and supporting agencies and structures to assist the evolution
of these employee holdings into an effective labour-managed sector (see
Uvalić and Vaughan-Whitehead, 1997). The lessons from the Yugoslav
self-management experiment need also to be drawn and digested. This
has become an urgent agenda for policy orientated research in this field,
before the significant employee owned sector in these countries disappears
either via bankruptcy or reversion to the capitalist form.
Note
1 Of course, in practice almost all the countries applied all the methods. The
figure refers to the main method of privatization.
References
Saul Estrin 159
Bartlett et al. (1992) ‘Labor-Managed vs. Private Firms: An Empirical
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Belka, M., Estrin, S., Schaffer, M. E. and Singh, I. J. (1995) ‘Enterprise Adjustment
in Poland: Evidence from a Survey of 200 Private, Privatised and State-Owned
Firms’, CEP Discussion Paper, no. 233.