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

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