The Influence of the EU on Territorial Social Dialogue in Bulgaria: Institutional Change and Local Actors’ Perceptions

On the eve of the 1989, only few Central and East European countries, such as Hungary and Poland, had (embryonic) social dialogue experience. At the beginning of the transition period, all the CEEC have established national tripartite institutions of social dialogue in order to ensure a peaceful transition to democracy and market economy. Nevertheless, scholars and observers pointed out the problematic issue of their actual functioning. The industrial relation systems “in making” were characterized as “CEECs transitional model with strong statist features” (Kohl and Platzer 2007) and the tripartite social dialogue as an “illusory corporatism” which aimed at legitimizing the system rather than resolving conflicts (Ost 2000). In this context, during the accession process, EU has required an actual involvement of social actors in these institutions and the institutionalization of social partnership at sectoral/branch and local levels. Territorial social dialogue in CEECs is still an underexplored topic in social science literature. One should bear in mind that these countries were strongly centralized before 1989 and that the process of regionalisation “illustrates well the ambiguity of [EU] conditionality” (Hughes 2003). In addition to the EU’s pressure, “in a global economy, local territories become strategic resources and individual sites are often in competition within multinational firms” (Jobert 2005). In this respect the aim of the paper is to analyse the EU’s impact on territorial social dialogue institution building and social partners’ perception of this process in Bulgaria. The two interrelated research questions of the paper are: 1) under what EU’s conditions territorial social dialogue institutions (regional and municipal tripartite cooperation councils) were built?;and 2)what are social partners perceptions on their development and actual functioning? The research is mainly based on primary national and EU official documents and by semi-structured interviews with representatives from trade unions and employers organization. Moreover, the paper uses, newspapers, and data collected by previous academic research on industrial relations and social dialogue in CEECs.