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

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