Adam Mrozowicki, Jan Czarzasty

At the outbreak of the pandemic, many scholars of collective labour relations predicted the emergence of a deep socio-economic crisis. To us, such a development also seemed possible. It was assumed that countries where partnership relations between social dialogue partners were present in the pre-crisis period (e.g. Germany or the Benelux countries) would also maintain them in a crisis situation, while for societies with weaker corporatist traditions cooperation would be weaker (Ebbinghaus and Weishaupt 2022). At the same time, there were counter-arguments: based on comparative studies, it was claimed that the shock of the pandemic prompted even those governments (and employers’ organisations) that were sceptical about social dialogue (Brandl 2021).

As part of the COV-WORK project, we conducted more than 20 expert interviews with representatives of national and sectoral trade unions, employers’ organisations and government in the education, health care, social welfare and logistics sectors.  Their aim was, among other things, to assess the development of tripartite social dialogue in Poland in the context of the socio-economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. The theoretical point of reference was the literature on the varieties and diversity of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the related debate on the varieties of industrial relations in the region. This helped to clarify the long-term structural and institutional foundations of social dialogue in Poland.

Inspired by research on the institutional foundations of the Polish capitalist system by Ryszard Rapacki and Juliusz Gardawski (2021), we hypothesised that the Polish system of industrial relations (used interchangeably with the concept of collective labour relations) reflects a “developmental drift” resulting in the emergence of “patchwork capitalism.” This system is characterised by profound institutional incoherence, combining elements from the pre-capitalist (feudal) period, the times of real socialism and neoliberalism. At the time of designing our analysis (in spring 2020), we hypothesised that the lack of complementarity at the institutional level, the key role of the state in collective labour relations and the weakness of tripartite institutions (such as the Social Dialogue Council) would weaken social dialogue in the pandemic. We presumed that the crisis would further strengthen the ‘illusory corporatism’ (as David Ost described it back in 1990/2000 (2011)) in Polish labour relations.

The analyses of the collected expert interviews essentially confirmed our assumptions. Unlike in 2008, when the government, in its search for anti-crisis solutions, turned to the social partners in the Trilateral Commission (although in the end, it far ignored their proposals), the fear of a public health and economic crisis has not shaken the Polish industrial relations system. It retains its dualistic (hybrid) character, while steadily evolving towards a system whose main axis is strong state voluntarism. Whether to refer to this system as illusory corporatism 3.0, neo-state corporatism or neo-ethnicism remains an open question. This is not a new phenomenon. The very introduction of weak tripartite institutions by liberal governments in the 1990s was aimed at preserving ‘social peace’, meeting the expectations of the European Union in the accession process and suppressing social conflict without systemic support for worker participation.

The pandemic brought a deepening of this type of ‘authoritarian innovation in industrial relations’ (Ford et al. 2021). The government has not formally consulted on crisis shields and financial shields, and in the spring of 2020 it attempted to weaken the autonomy of the Social Dialogue Council by building into the crisis shield a provision giving the Prime Minister the right to dismiss its members. In addition, there has also been discussion of changes to industrial dispute resolution regulations that would de facto limit the right to strike (including by eliminating the institution of the solidarity strike from the law). Our trade union interviewees and interlocutors openly described the pandemic period as the ‘worst’ in the history of the tripartite institutions, pointing to their very limited ability to influence the regulations created. The fact that regulations on remote working were not enacted throughout the pandemic period, despite being consulted for months in the RDS tripartite teams, may also testify to the impotence of social dialogue institutions, as well as the attitude of the state towards them.

The reduction in social dialogue has not been accompanied by an intensification of traditional forms of protest in industrial relations, such as industrial disputes or strikes. However, the pandemic has opened up new fields of conflict in labour and employment relations, including workers on online platforms, the self-employed or micro-enterprise owners, where both trade unions and employer organisations are absent. Research suggests that under pandemic conditions, informal and spontaneous protests clearly outweigh formalised ones. The example of White City 2.0 is worth citing here, but also new coalitions during street demonstrations formed, for example, between AgroUnion and the trade unions at Amazon. Also unprecedented in Poland were the grassroots protests of the Glovo couriers in Bialystok in spring 2021. In the (post-)pandemic reality of overlapping health, economic, migration and environmental crises, we can expect more such new, often non-union forms of mobilisation.

The main threat to the system of collective labour relations appears to be the prospect of further marginalisation of trade unions due to the progressive capture of the trade union agenda by the government and its political camp, as evidenced, inter alia, by the scale of the minimum wage increase for 2023. Such tendencies are reinforced by unilateral political decisions, manifested by a disregard for tripartism. All of this makes the substitution of trade unions by (right-wing) populist parties, which is one of the scenarios for the future development of trade unions mentioned by Jelle Visser, under conditions of a (post)pandemic crisis (2019), is beginning to become plausible.

The entry is a preview of the authors’ text entitled. ‘The nail in the coffin? Pandemic and social dialogue in Poland’, and the main findings of the research were presented, among others, at the Industrial Relations in Europe Conference in Tampere (14-16.09.2022).

Bibliography

Brandl, B. (2021). The cooperation between business organizations, trade unions, and the state during the COVID-19 pandemic: A comparative analysis of the nature of the tripartite relationship. Industrial Relations, https://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12300

Ebbinghaus, B., & Weishaupt, T. J. (2022). Postscript: social partnership facing the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. In B. Ebbinghaus & T. J. Weishaupt (Eds.), The Role of Social Partners in Managing Europe’s Great Recession. Crisis Corporatism or Corporatism in Crisis (pp. 279-293). London & New York: Routledge.

Ford, M., Gillan, M., & Ward, K. (2021). Authoritarian innovations in labor governance: The case of Cambodia. Governance, 34(4), 1255-1271. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12559

Gardawski, J., & Rapacki, R. (2021). Patchwork capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe – a new conceptualization. Warsaw Forum of Economic Sociology, 2( 23).

Ost, D. (2011). ‘Illusory Corporatism’ Ten Years Later. Warsaw Forum of Economic Sociology, 2(1), 19-49.

Visser, J. (2019). Trade Unions in the Balance. ILO ACTRAV Working Paper https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_dialogue/—actrav/documents/publication/wcms_722482.pdf