Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
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CATHERINE SPIESER<br />
the unemployed mentioned the unemployment<br />
benefit as their main source of economic<br />
support. 50% relied primarily on partner or<br />
family support and only 5% on social assistance<br />
(ISSP 1997).<br />
2.2. Measures facilitating labour market exit<br />
while bypassing the unemployment status<br />
Neither the worsening economic situation of<br />
the unemployed nor the reforms restricting<br />
the unemployment benefit triggered specific<br />
collective mobilization in Poland. These issues<br />
were not among the priorities on the agenda of<br />
trade unions, except in a few specific instances.<br />
Things differed when a large number of workers<br />
with a strong tradition of mobilization faced a<br />
deterioration of their work situation. In effect,<br />
‘the political threat posed by unemployment’<br />
(Baxandall 2003: 253) was primarily in the<br />
discontent of politically influential workers<br />
still in employment who risked losing their<br />
jobs. There were two major instances: the<br />
process of restructuring of strategic sectors in<br />
which workers had enjoyed a privileged status<br />
and workers with a long career behind them<br />
and no future in the new market society were<br />
concerned. In view of avoiding social conflict,<br />
these categories of people were often granted<br />
special compensation that not only bypassed but<br />
also undermined the standard unemployment<br />
benefit.<br />
This resulted in a segmentation of policies<br />
addressing unemployment: the jobless were not<br />
covered by one universal scheme, but split among<br />
a variety of compensation or social security<br />
mechanisms, which some saw as a deliberate<br />
government strategy to ‘divide and pacify’<br />
groups opposing market reforms (Vanhuysse<br />
2006). Without going that far, these policy<br />
choices clearly gave more favourable conditions<br />
to the groups that had the greatest capacity to<br />
mobilize against economic transformations,<br />
workers with a long career under the previous<br />
regime who had no future in the capitalist<br />
economy, and workers in strongly unionized<br />
sectors such as heavy industry and mining.<br />
Aside these particularistic schemes, the<br />
universal unemployment benefit set up as early<br />
as 1990 quickly became marginal as a result<br />
of successive reforms. The unemployed, hardly<br />
identifiable as a social group, neither developed<br />
a collective consciousness nor uniform<br />
interests in the face of welfare reforms; the few<br />
instances of mobilisation concerned primarily<br />
the conditions of collective dismissals and early<br />
retirement for workers in specific industrial<br />
sectors.<br />
Collective dismissals and severance payments<br />
Trade unions, which gathered the workers<br />
facing the threat of becoming unemployed,<br />
were potentially the strongest organized<br />
opposition group and retained a significant<br />
mobilization capacity in sectors like steel or<br />
mining 12 . In a few cases of large company<br />
or sector restructuring, the conditions of<br />
unemployment, or more precisely, the conditions<br />
of dismissal led to intense negotiations. The<br />
Act on Dismissals of 1989 set the rules of large<br />
workforce reductions and measures<br />
to protect affected employees and<br />
imposed some obligations on the page 133<br />
employer (notification of the trade<br />
unions in advance; stating the reasons<br />
for redundancies and the number of people<br />
concerned; informing the local employment<br />
office; and developing a program for retraining