Peace in companies, tripartite conflict? Comparison of industrial relations at the national and workplace level in Central and Eastern Europe.

Abstract

This paper investigates the predictive power of the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach for the industrial relations climate in Central Eastern Europe. The research makes use of the 2009 European Company Survey to evaluate the relations of trade unions and management at the workplace. Consequently, it categorises the results according to this theoretical background and compares them to the types of industrial relations described in the VoC literature. The industrial relations climate in the sample countries only shows the expected pattern in terms of the purely attitudinal answers. However, after analysing items based on the experiences of the social partners, the pattern disappears. The main conclusion is that the VoC approach can, to a certain extent, predict the attitudes of labour and management toward each other; however, actual practices are often different from reported attitudes.