Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

CATHERINE SPIESER
ABSTRACT
THE POLITICS OF LABOUR MARKET ADJUST-
MENT IN POST-1989 POLAND.
TRAJECTORY OF POLICY REFORM, POLITICS
OF SOCIAL CHANGE AND EMERGING WELFARE
REGIME. 1
Catherine Spieser
7
Labour market adjustment is constructed
by the policies that set the rules for the
governance of employment and unemployment.
Therefore, labour market polices
have redistributive implications. Their orientations
are defined in a process involving various
socio-political actors (unions, employers associations,
government with a partisan orientation).
This has been particularly salient in Central
and Eastern Europe given the pressure for
adaptation to new market conditions resulting
from economic liberalisation. Starting with a
critical review of Esping-Andersen’s concept
of welfare regimes, which places emphasis on
the politics of social risk redistribution, this
paper explores the policies and politics of labour
market adjustment in Poland since 1989.
It builds on original and secondary material
and has a strong empirical component. The
aim is twofold: (i) to identify which welfare
regime (if any) is gradually taking shape and
(ii) to uncover the socio-political compromise
on which it rests. While policies have generally
tended to become minimalist over time,
retracing the trajectory of policy reform in two
domains - unemployment compensation, on
the one hand, and the rules governing employment
relationship, on the other - reveals
that there are two contrasted worlds of ‘labour
market politics’.
INTRODUCTION
page 121
The breakdown of authoritarian communist
regimes consecutive to the fall of the
Berlin wall twenty years ago had one uncontested
immediate effect: it gave rise to a wave