The centrality of labor market issues to the future of the European Union (EU) was made clear in June of this year (2005), when Polish plumbers sent the European Constitution down to an ignominious defeat.

Of course, Polish plumbers had no direct role in the French electorate's strong vote against ratification. There are only about 140 of them in France, and the French plumbing union itself says there is a shortage of 6000 plumbers in the country. Nevertheless, "Polish plumbers" entered the political lexicon in a powerful way when an anti-EU party chose the term as its campaign centerpiece, its symbol of why voters should reject the Constitution - and many wavering workers were persuaded. (The argument was that such workers would take the jobs of French citizens.) Polish plumbers might not have defeated the Constitution, but the specter of them clearly had a strong impact. Real workers in Poland, meanwhile, wondered what kind of European Union they had just joined.

On May 1, 2004, the European Union expanded from 15 members to 25. Except for Cyprus and Malta, all the new entrants were former communist states from Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The entry of so many countries so much poorer than the norm in the West - the new members added some 75 million people to the EU but only about 4 percent to its total GDP - poses particular challenges as far as the new European labor market is concerned. While laborers in the old member countries (the EU-15) fear being undercut by cheap labor from the new member countries, those in the new countries fear being cast as second-class citizens of a united Europe. Indeed, in some ways they already are: despite being full member citizens, East Europeans still do not have the unfettered right to work wherever they wish that the EU-15 guarantees its own citizens. (EU-15 countries were given seven years in which they could bar eastern laborers; only Britain, Ireland, and Sweden have so far declined to invoke this provision.) And since the ramifications of labor market disputes can upset plans for European integration as a whole, as signified by French events, many business leaders are actually displeased by this breakdown in working class solidarity.

East European Labor
What the plumber story shows is the continued weakness of East European labor. After the fall of communism in 1989, the new governments in the region rushed not only to adopt neoliberal economic policies but to set about weakening organized labor as well. It's not that workers were particularly strong under communist governments. They could not, after all, elect their own leaders or publicly promote alternatives to their employers (the state). But they did have guaranteed jobs, weak job discipline, and ability to block particularly objectionable provisions the employer-state might want to introduce; under the old system, ruling Communist parties needed to show that they were still, in some sense, parties of the working class.

One way the former governments demonstrated their proletarian credentials was by building gigantic workforces in heavy manufacturing industries. Eastern Europe had a significantly higher percentage of its population employed in industry and construction than Western Europe, with 1980s figures ranging from 36.3 percent of the Polish population to 49.8 percent of Czechoslovakia's. (The real Polish figures were actually higher, since a large number of small private farmers had to supplement meager farm earnings with wage labor in factories.) Comparable figures for most western countries were about 25 percent. Numbers weren't the only liability: East European production processes also suffered from poor management and outdated technology.

It is precisely because there were so many workers in such vulnerable sectors that, after 1989, things became so bad so fast. The recessions began as soon as the state decided to free prices, eliminate subsidies, and allow goods from abroad to compete with those produced at home. Presented with both western and homemade goods at comparable prices, and having heard for so long about the superiority of the former, consumers jumped at the chance to feel themselves part of the West by owning its products. Some economists called for stiff tariffs to protect weak domestic industry, but Eastern Europe instead chose greater openness than the West ever had - due in part to western demands, which made open borders a condition for joining the EU. As a result, domestic production plummeted. Industrial output fell about 30 percent throughout the region in the first year after the fall of communism - the largest peacetime contraction since the Great Depression. Real wages declined about 20 percent, even more in the former Soviet Union.

For trade unions in the region, all this was a disaster. Everything about them quickly declined: their membership, workplace authority, collective solidarity, enterprise responsibilities, political influence, and sectoral diversity. Unions are now far more prominent in the state-owned service sector (particularly health and education) than in industry, where employment has declined dramatically.

One might expect a labor movement accustomed to exercising some influence to mobilize strongly against such outcomes. But in fact, postcommunism has been accompanied by a dramatic decline in union mobilization. One reason is that organizing is always difficult in times of economic downturns. When unemployment is increasing and firms are closing, people who have jobs tend to be thankful and prefer not to rock the boat. As a result, strikes have become rare. According to a recent report, Poland and Lithuania are now the least "strike-prone" countries in the EU (with Spain and Italy the most), and when strikes do occur, they are most likely to take place in health, education, or railroads, not in manufacturing.1

But if objective economic conditions are one explanation for postcommunist union weakness, subjective factors probably explain even more. The main point here is that, for many workers in Eastern Europe, trade unions were associated not with capitalism but with communism. When communism disappeared, many workers felt trade unions were no longer relevant.

In the old days, trade union membership had been virtually obligatory. After 1989, many workers took advantage of their freedom by refraining from rejoining. Others believed that unions might be necessary in state-owned firms, in order to prevent state authorities from abusing their power, but not in private ones, where it was thought that "real owners will pay good workers good wages."

In what might seem like a paradox, trade union leaders tended to be less militant than the rank-and-file. But in fact this follows from the historical context. In the first postcommunist years, most unions in the region continued to be led by people who had been unionists under the old regime, meaning they had long been associated with management; although the management may have changed, the habits of cooperation continued. Of course, habits were different among new trade unions, which were particularly strong in Hungary, Bulgaria, and most of all in Poland, whose trade union Solidarity played the crucial role in toppling the old regime. But the new unions tended to be even more pro-management than the old ones, based on the reasoning that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

For the new unions had arisen in order to challenge communism. If the new managers and private owners were building a system to replace communism, then these unions did not want to disrupt the process. In 1989, the Solidarity Weekly in Poland urged its members to "actively participate in (or at least silently accept)" the new policies of "reductions, belt-tightening, and heightened on-the-job discipline." In that new era, even Solidarity president Lech Walesa expressed distrust of unions, saying that "we will not catch up to Europe" by building unions.2

Hard to Undo
What is the current situation? There have certainly been some changes. As a new generation of workers comes to have experience with a real market economy, instead of an imaginary one, more of them think they need trade unions after all. So unions have begun to do some recruiting, aided by the economic growth that began in the late 1990s (though unemployment continues to be high, reaching 20 percent in places like Poland).

Still, the damage of the past is hard to undo. Unionism remains particularly weak in the new private sector - since few unionists after 1989 believed the private sector needed to be organized, and because domestic employers in particular have done their best to keep unions out of their plants. Unions have become fixtures in the large, western-based multinational manufacturing firms, such as General Motors or Volkswagen. (In many cases, these organizing efforts were aided by West European unions, which realized they needed more international organizing in order to preserve their own strength.) In other parts of the private economy, however, such as in retail, recent attempts to organize unions have produced only limited results. As a result of the weakened unions of the past, management has become used to union weakness, and now deploys a host of techniques, both legal and illegal, to keep unions out. The illegal techniques can be challenged in court, but, as elsewhere, this takes so much time that few aggrieved activists even bother.

The comparative weakness of East European unions takes us back to our opening anecdote. For many workers in the EU-15, the legitimate fear is not that Polish plumbers and other easterners will take their jobs but that the less regulated and less unionized eastern industrial-relations systems will erode the more favorable ones western labor worked so hard to construct. The concern is that eastern political expansion will end up being a Trojan Horse for the unraveling of western industrial relations.

Unfortunately, in all this wrangling it is East European laborers who suffer the most; they are hurt both by the weak unionism in the east and the wary suspicions of the west. To be sure, some things are changing. As mentioned above, many East European workers are changing their attitudes toward unions, and there have been increasing attempts to unionize the eastern economies, often with help from western unions. There are also attempts to heal rifts: After the EU constitutional vote, some French politicians and unionists publicly invited Polish plumbers to consider working in France. But as this only confirms, the new east-west dual labor market will, for the foreseeable future, have significant - and often inconsistent - effects on livelihoods and politics throughout the European Union.

Notes
1. Mark Carley. 2005. "Developments in Industrial Action, 2000-4," in European Industrial Relations Observatory On-Line; available at <http://www.eiro.eurofound.ie/2005/06/update/tn0506101u.html>.
2. See the discussion in chapter two of my book, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Suggested Readings
Bohle, Dorothee and Bela Greskovits. 2004. "Capital, Labor, and the Prospects of the European Social Model in the East," Working Paper No. 58 of Central and Eastern European Working Paper Series, Harvard University; available at <http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/Bohle.pdf>.
Crowley, Stephen and David Ost, eds. 2001. Workers After Workers' States: Labor and Politics in Eastern Europe After Communism (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield Press).
Greskovits, Bela. 1998. The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: Eastern European and Latin American Transformations Compared (Budapest: Central European University Press).
Kubicek, Paul. 2004. Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: From Solidarity to Infirmity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
Meardi, Guglielmo. 2002. "The Trojan Horse for the Americanization of Europe? Polish Industrial Relations Toward the EU," in European Journal of Industrial Relations 8 (1), pp. 77-99.
Ost, David. 2005. The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Pollert, Anna. 1999. Transformation at Work: In the New Market Economies of Central Eastern Europe (Los Angeles: Sage).

David Ost is professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and occasional visiting professor at Central European University. His most recent work on labor in post-communist society is The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. He can be reached at ost@hws.edu.

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