In Hungary, collective bargaining processes and outcomes have been comprehensively restructured since the start of the economic crisis. This article presents two channels through which the crisis has affected collective bargaining in the country: direct economic challenges and political change. The economic challenges intensified processes that had started before 2008, leading to further polarization of the labour force in the private sector and further austerity in the public sector. The shift in the political environment, on the other hand, has had a more fundamental transformative impact, shaking the institutional underpinnings of collective bargaining. The findings presented here suggest that the Orbán government has been pursuing an ambiguous course in labour relations, combining elements of radical neoliberal reform and state interventionism. Following Bohle and Greskovits’ 2012 framework, these developments are interpreted in the context of broader political-economic contradictions that embedded neoliberal regimes have to confront.
This article analyses the impact of new public management on employment relations in public healthcare in Hungary and Slovakia. We argue that hospital corporatization – a process which changed the ownership structure and management of public hospitals without privatization – created an opportunity for institutional change in collective bargaining. However, the interaction between hospital owners and managements, the state and trade unions accounts for the absence of major institutional change. Instead, corporatization helped maintain bargaining coordination in Slovakia and bargaining fragmentation in Hungary.
The recent upsurge in healthcare labour disputes across Europe signals a shift in the attitude of public service professionals towards contentious politics. However, the analysis of these events so far has neglected the specific dilemmas of contention among professionals. To fill this gap, the article builds on social movements theory and claims that to achieve success, professional organizations need to adjust the protest tactics of the labour movement along the three dimensions of targeting, framing and coordination. As an alternative to mass strikes, the targeted use of the protest repertoire minimizes the costs and maximizes the visibility of collective action. Framing around service quality links wage demands to wider justification themes that resonate with the public. Coordination across groups with different skill levels strengthens the effect of both targeting and framing. A comparative study of four healthcare campaigns in four countries (Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland) confirms the key role that these dimensions play.
This paper asks how governments across Europe have responded to the dilemma between financial responsibility and political responsiveness against the background of heightened fiscal pressure. Focusing on the domestic politics of healthcare reforms in four contrasted cases (England, France, Hungary, and Ireland), we investigate how governments frame and legitimize these reforms. We find that references to input legitimacy vary greatly according to prevailing values of governments and party politics in the respective national realms. With regard to output legitimacy, efficiency and financial sustainability tend to prevail over concerns related to quality in those countries that are more affected by debt. Across all cases, governments rely on an instrumentalist conception of throughput legitimacy, meaning that they use consultation with different stakeholders as a way to prevent adverse politicization and to support their framing of the reforms.
Under what conditions can organized labour successfully politicize the European integration process across borders? To answer this question, we compare the European Citizens' Initiatives (ECIs) of two European trade union federations: EPSU's successful Right2Water ECI and ETF's unsuccessful Fair Transport ECI. Our comparison reveals that actor-centred factors matternamely, unions' ability to create broad coalitions. Successful transnational labour campaigns, however, also depend on structural conditions, namely, the prevailing mode of EU integration pressures faced by unions at a given time. Whereas the Right2Water ECI pre-emptively countered commodification attempts by the European Commission in water services, the Fair Transport ECI attempted to ensure fair working conditions after most of the transport sector had been liberalized. Vertical EU integration attempts that commodify public services are thus more likely to generate successful transnational counter-movements than the horizontal integration pressures on wages and working conditions that followed earlier successful EU liberalization drives.
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