Collective Action Networks: Czech Trade Union Organisations in Time and Space

The transformation of trade unions in post-socialist realm still has not been explored in a sufficient detail. After nearly three decades of swift organizational and political decline, trade unions are still undergoing large scale transformation of economic and political field. Most importantly, former top-down and “universal” way of union organization has been replaced by new industry-oriented organizing and by enterprise-level organizing at the same time. Massive transformation of economic and politics after 1989 thus necessarily led to the fast transformation of trade union organizations in terms of the intensity and diversity of their cooperation patterns but also of to their diversification through the rise of different types of spatial inequalities and even competition among them (in terms of interest representation, resources, ideology etc.). The transformation of economic and political context did not have the same pace nor consequences and gave rise to various types of spaces for trade union organizing and strategies. Even if the most politically visible trade union strategies are confederations´ negotiation with the government in metropole(s), much more is going on in the local level. However, assessment of such transformation needs to prioritize relational perspective in the study of interest promotion and collective action. This paper has two main goals – conceptual and analytical. First, it has been argued that emergence, protest patterns and cooperation strategies of trade unions differ in large cities and in peripheries. Therefore, the paper aims at conceptualizing the role of local political and economic context for trade unions emergence, protest and cooperation. Second, the paper aims at empirical analysis of how emergence of trade unions in post-socialism is related to the economic and political character of localities, how it interacts with the frequency of protest, and most importantly, how it is related to the character of protest coalitions. Particularly, the paper asks what is the role of political and economic context in the share of intra-sectoral and cross-sectoral ties of trade union coalitions, how it affects the selection of non-trade union protest partners, and how is it related to the leadership in protest organizing. The paper builds on two datasets. First, it employs survey of local trade union organizations (N=42) in order to generate insights in terms of their relational strategies and context perception, and protest event analysis of trade union protest in the Czech Republic (1989-2017) which is used to validate these insights with the longitudinal protest data.