Enterprise Strategies and Labour Relations in Central and Eastern Europe

The majority of contemporary discussions of transformation in Eastern Europe are focused around either political changes or macroeconomic developments; enterprise-level labour relations have received considerably less attention. The institutionalization of new patterns of labour relations is highly contingent upon the prevailing economic and political conditions and this may lead some to argue that it is too early to try to study labour relations at the enterprise level. The function of this chapter, however, is to argue that developments at this level are a constituent element in change processes. The discussion draws upon research on processes of change in labour relations in Bulgaria, Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Poland and the Novosibirsk region of Russia. It has been a basic hypothesis of our research that privatization of large state enterprises, and the resulting weakening in centralized control of the economy, would radically alter the context for labour relations in Eastern Europe and in particular, would greatly enhance the opportunities for strategy formulation at enterprise level.