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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THE POLITICS OF LABOUR MARKET ADJUST-<br />
MENT IN POST-1989 POLAND<br />
In the original analysis, a welfare regime is<br />
also understood as a stable socio-political<br />
configuration revealing a particular kind<br />
of social contract and consistent policy<br />
orientations across all branches of the<br />
welfare state. In this perspective, the striking<br />
contrast between, on the one hand, the active<br />
involvement of the trade unions in the debate<br />
over labour law reform and, on the other,<br />
their complete absence in the face of the<br />
retrenchment of unemployment compensation<br />
is puzzling. The idea of a consistent ‘welfare<br />
regime’ is undermined by the co-existence of<br />
two worlds of ‘labour market politics’ involving<br />
distinct configurations of actors, which tend to<br />
constitute two separate ‘public policy arenas’. 36<br />
entitlements, is hardly politicised at all. Political<br />
conflict tends to be restricted to particular<br />
regional or sectoral arenas, and what is at stake<br />
is a particularistic compensation rather than<br />
a universal solution. In theory, the actors who<br />
are explicitly involved in the decision-making<br />
process are very similar to those found in the<br />
employment policy arena, but the salience of<br />
policy reform is not, since the unemployed are<br />
not well represented by the union side. The<br />
political salience of unemployment was high<br />
only when it appeared as a threat to workers<br />
in highly unionised sectors, while the general<br />
debate focused on the issue of employment<br />
creation, and thus the flexibility of employment<br />
conditions.<br />
page 148<br />
In what could be termed the ‘arena of employment<br />
regulation’, we can observe something<br />
that resembles ‘a stable and continual conflict<br />
that can only be understood in class terms’<br />
(Lowi 1964: 715), in other words, a typical<br />
configuration of redistributive politics. Two<br />
sides can be identified, as employers and trade<br />
unions were actively negotiating the orientation<br />
and reform of rules governing labour relations,<br />
in terms of a trade-off between flexibility<br />
and employee protection (security). However,<br />
rising unemployment resulted in a convergence<br />
of the seemingly antagonistic policy preferences<br />
of the two sides in a compromise in favour<br />
of more flexibility. The Tripartite Commission<br />
was an important deliberative forum<br />
in which to discuss such compromises,<br />
although in effect agreements were<br />
rarely reached there.<br />
By contrast, in the ‘unemployment policy arena’,<br />
defining the conditions of income support to<br />
the unemployed, even in the face of reducing