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All roads lead to decentralization? Collective bargaining trends and prospects in Central and Eastern Europe

Collective bargaining is one of the building blocks of western European industrial relations systems. According to Visser and Kaminska (2009: 19), ‘a degree of solidarity wage setting based on coordination at the sectoral level or above’ was an important factor behind the creation of national social protection systems and the unprecedented growth in Europe in the first decades following the Second World War. Apart from its contribution to macroeconomic management, coordinated bargaining at sectoral and national levels has brought tangible benefits for its participants, providing workers with collective voice and guaranteed high wages and decent working conditions. For employers, it has minimized the threat of cheap competition from non-unionized companies and lowered the risks of union whipsawing and industrial conflict, encouraging long-term planning and investment (Visser, 2013). In the process of transition from communism to capitalism, all Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries formally established collective bargaining institutions. However, their role has been more limited than in western Europe: with the exception of Slovenia, singleemployer bargaining has been dominant, and collective bargaining coverage has been lower than in the old EU Member States. The post-2008 economic downturn posed new challenges to the region’s weak bargaining structures, as the crisis-time negotiations had to take account of falling output and government belt-tightening. Still, CEE collective bargaining systems have fared very differently since 2008. Whereas some countries have experienced a modest revival of plant-level negotiations, in others the importance of bargaining institutions has decreased even further. Taking the pre-crisis socio-economic models in the new EU Member States as our point of departure, this article reconstructs the different trajectories followed by CEE collective bargaining systems during the recent crisis. It argues that the variations observed in bargaining practices and outcomes reflect the countries’ industrial structures, regulatory frameworks, government policies implemented during the downturn, and long-term trends and path dependencies. In its second part, the article assesses the prospects for establishing multi-employer coordinated bargaining in the new EU Member States, concluding that this is unlikely in view of the lack of bargaining traditions and supporting institutions, as well as the enduring weakness of CEE social partner organizations.