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

THE POLITICS OF LABOUR MARKET ADJUST-
MENT IN POST-1989 POLAND
Finally, Bismarckian policies, or conservativecorporatist
policies, are based on an insider
status enjoyed by a category of individuals
who contribute to social insurance in exchange
for future entitlements. Therefore, they tend to
emphasise the link between contributions and
social security, or individual fairness, rather
than universal solidarity.
The inherited ‘state of entitlements’ (Inglot
2003) in Poland in the early 1990s combined
universal and Bismarckian aspects. With
respect to a shift of welfare regime, three
hypotheses can be formulated. First, generous
universalistic policies tend to become
minimalist residual ones when there is a shift
in, or a breakdown of the coalition among risk
communities in favour of self-reliant ones.
Second, redistributive politics characterised
by a recurrent two-side conflict are likely
to be observed primarily in areas in which
entitlements pre-exist. Third, as a consequence,
Bismarckian (conservative-corporatist) policies
are unlikely to be easily replaced by minimalist
residual ones because they are supported by
identifiable categories of beneficiaries who
gained rights and entitlements in return for
resources invested in the system, and seek
to maintain these benefits. The dynamics of
adjustment in Poland and policies connected
with labour market risks provide new grounds
on which to examine the validity of these
hypotheses.
page 128 With a view to testing these propositions,
sections 2 and 3 trace the trajectory
of successive reforms of un/
employment policy with a focus on two institutions
that can be considered cornerstones of
the post-industrial capitalist welfare state: the
employment relationship and unemployment
insurance.
2. UNEMPLOYMENT POLICY BY DEFAULT: THE
WEAKNESS OF SOCIAL INSURANCE AND THE IM-
PORTANCE OF PARTICULARISTIC REGIMES.
This section reviews the policies that
contributed to the institutionalization (and to a
lesser extent the alleviation) of unemployment,
the management of mass dismissals through
exit to inactivity and the slow emergence of a
broader government program of action against
unemployment, including active labour market
policies eventually seeking to add obligations
to social rights.
2.1. The recent institutionalisation of
unemployment
Unlike other social problems, unemployment
really appeared on the political agenda in 1990
as a result of the first transition measures and
was to be addressed with little experience to
build upon. Unemployment compensation and
labour market policies more generally do not
have a long history in Poland. 5
Unemployment as a new social problem
Prior to 1989, everyone had a constitutional
right to work; and unemployment had been
made illegal (Mlonek 1999). As a result, the
concept of unemployment was rarely used as
an analytical category and was inexistent as a
category of public intervention. While at a
marginal level a form of frictional unemployment
(the gap between one’s job and the
successive one, when one changes jobs) could