Resurrection/Reconnection? Trade Union Revitalizing in Post-Socialist Settings

The transformation of trade unions in post-socialist settings still has followed quite specific path. After nearly three decades of swift organizational and political decline, which was to a large extent determined by transformation of structural conditions of society (economic transition and crises, political reforms, anti-collectivist sentiments and pro-market discourse), there have been some recent attempts to revitalize labour movement and re-assert its political and cultural power. The paper builds on the Czech case which may provide deeper insight into post-socialist condition in general. In September 2015, freshly elected president of the Czech major confederation launched a long-term massive media campaign “End to Cheap Labour” aiming at increasing wages. After several years the campaign itself has been widely considered as successful, attracting new members and leading to creations of new trade union organizations. However, to what extent has it changed eroding labour structures in post-socialism? What kind of deeper change in labour organizational structures has it brought? Do we witness emerging labour movement? The paper builds on the social movement theory and more specifically on relational perspective in the study of interest promotion and collective action (McAdam, Fligstein, Crossley). It focuses on a specific field of collective action, zoom in to particular set of actors and assess their modes of coordination of collective action – interest group and social movement one among others (Diani). While assessing also various attributes of contentious collective action (protest frequency, attendance, repertoire etc.), the paper primarily seeks to evaluate changes in broader and enduring patterns of collective action coordination to discover any shifts in terms of frequency and composition of labour protest alliances. It follows three main goals. First, it focuses on the general position of Czech trade unions in the field of economic protest between 1989-2017 (with special emphasis on Great Recession) and identifies key shifts and type of alliances. Second, it aims at identification of modes of coordination of Czech trade unions with the emphasis on the period of before and after the launch of “End to Cheap Labour” campaign. Third, it aims to evaluate other attributes of contentious collective action (framing, attendance, targets, repertoire) to see how these match with (non-)changing modes of coordination. 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 protest event analysis of trade union protest in the Czech Republic (1990-2017) which is used to validate these insights with the longitudinal protest data (N=908).