Industrial Relations in Europe 2012 - European Commission - Europa

important for building additional resources, e.g. through a capable leadership, changes to
established formal and informal bargaining practices, and international cooperation with other
national and EU-level social partner organisations. In turn, additional resources help to
revitalise the social partners’ capacity for mobilising, and in the long run also strengthen
national industrial relations. The revitalisation of the social partners as central industrial
relations actors in the CEECs is a particularly important issue in this regard. This chapter has
offered various evidence on real and possible revitalisation strategies, which we summarise
below.
Revitalisation of CEEC employers’ associations is possible, based on the employers’
perception of increased benefits from bargaining coordination. In most CEECs employers are
fragmented and employers’ associations weakly developed. Therefore, the recent crisis led
commentators to assume that employers will prefer individualised, decentralised action
(which was widespread in many CEECs even before the crisis). However, this chapter has
provided evidence that in exceptional cases employers have showed commitment to
coordinated, for example sector-level, bargaining despite legally absent preconditions for this
type of bargaining (HU, SK). MNCs as important employers across the CEECs generally
prefer fragmented company-level bargaining, but at the same time have contributed to
increasing the capacities of employers’ organisations in a few CEECs (BG, LV, PL).
Moreover, MNCs have the largest potential for Europeanising company-level industrial
relations and transposing social dialogue practices across borders from the EU-15 to the
CEECs. This chapter has argued that MNC actions in the CEECs have not yet brought about a
significant Europeanisation of social standards, because MNCs tend to prefer to adapt to local
conditions. The role of EC Directives for establishing harmonised principles for employee
information and consultation at the workplace also has an effect on motivating coordinated
action on the side of employers. Despite this potential, the evidence has documented that the
implementation of EC Directives in the CEECs is a long-term process and has not yet
accomplished its goals.
Revitalisation is also central for trade unions as social partners. Frege and Kelly (2003)
argued that union revitalisation can address and possibly reverse the trend in membership
decline, and erosion of trade union presence at the workplace, maintain and improve trade
union mobilisation capacities, and bring about institutional change in the established practices
of social dialogue and collective bargaining. They identified the following trade union
revitalisation strategies in the EU-15: organising, organisational restructuring, coalition
building, partnership with employers, political action and international links (Frege and Kelly
2003). Meardi (2012) tested the relevance of these revitalisation strategies in the CEEC
context and argued that revitalisation is more likely to appear and succeed at the company and
workplace level. This is because of the rather decentralised nature of industrial relations
across most of the CEECs. This chapter supports Meardi’s argument in presenting workplacelevel
action taken by social partners, mainly but not only in MNCs. Slovenia is an interesting
paradox in this regard, because trade unions are relatively strong overall, but not in the
MNCs’ sites (Meardi 2012: 151). In addition, this chapter has documented that union
revitalisation can also originate through action at sectoral and national levels, targeting
sectoral employers’ associations (in bargaining demands) and/or the government (in austerityrelated
demands). In general, systematic evidence on such revitalisation in the CEECs is
scarce; and the case studies presented in section 2.4 suggest that concessions that unions
gained at the sectoral and national level after EU-enlargement and in the post-crisis period
were often temporary in character. In several CEECs unions engaged in political action,
especially where they found it more important to concentrate on national-level tripartite action
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