This article analyses a project by Finnish and Estonian unions to adopt 'organizing model' strategies through establishing the transnational 'Baltic Organising Academy'. Initially aimed at Estonian workplaces, successful campaigns inspired Finnish unions to copy the model in Finland. This cooperation was originally motivated by labour market interdependence between the two countries, and the failure of past social-partnership oriented union strategies in Estonia. The willingness of Finnish and Estonian unions to commit resources to transnational cooperation around an 'organizing model' marks a dramatic departure from the unions' previous strategies. This change was accomplished by transnational activists who have developed and raised support for the adoption of 'organizing model' in the face of structural challenges and ideological opposition by some union officials. The project's transnational organizing exemplifies one possible solution to union weakness in Eastern Europe, and underlines the importance of 'identity work' in building transnational trade union coalitions around organizing.

This article studies trade union revitalization within broader trends of projectification that marks a shift towards project work and its temporary organization. It accordingly compares instances of project-based organizational restructuring in post-crisis Estonia and Slovenia in order to identify their drivers, power resources employed and their outcomes and wider impact. In both countries, project-based organizational restructuring was driven by proactive activists capable of innovatively utilizing available power resources and new opportunity structures that had opened up with EU integration. While Slovenian unions utilized a more diverse set of power resources and revitalization strategies, activists in both countries stimulated trade union project-based organizational restructuring in order to initiate and sustain their main, context specific, revitalization strategies. Findings also show that project-based organizational restructuring can be an interim phase for unions to increase their resources and use them to turn their revitalization strategies into more permanent ones.

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This chapter studies trade union responses to the precarization of work in the retail sector in three post-socialist East European countries: Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia. The aim of the chapter is to analyse the influence of sectoral specifics, different institutional factors, and trade unions’ power resources on union approaches towards precarious work, and to explore the potential for new patterns of solidarity. The main thrust of the argument is that unions’ power is crucial for developing and sustaining the industrial relations institutions, which in turn shape constraints and opportunities for trade unions’ actions. However, the strategic choices exerted by trade union leaders also matter. While higher institutional and associational power still enables Slovene unions to regulate the conditions of precarious workers to a certain extent, the institutional weakness of Estonian and Polish unions make them increasingly reliant on their network embeddedness and narrative resources to mobilize against precarization.