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

ALEKSANDRA JANOVSKAIA
very sensitive as far as the competitive
positions of their countries were concerned.
Rather than following the advice of the
European Metalworker Federation, which
since 1998 has been formulating guidelines
insisting that wage bargaining should cover
at least a part of labour productivity increases,
metalworker unions in Central Europe have
not seriously made participation in labour
productivity a part of their bargaining agenda.
Their bargaining demands as well as achieved
outcomes have been much closer focussing on
covering inflation. Union officials confirmed
that it was important to preserve the wage gap
to Germany, as this has been their comparative
advantage: thus, Czech and Slovak wages are
still at about one third of German wages, while
productivity differences are substantial but
smaller (Interview August 2007). This explicit
union goal of preserving wage gap to the
German wages despite very high productivity
increases is a clear sign of competitiveness logic
that unions now share with local management.
To sum up, during the late 1990s and early
2000s, the local management-labour coalitions
have become stronger in VW subsidiaries.
High functional flexibility and low wage
increases have been the two central pillars of
these enterprise production coalitions. These
were traded by unions for company expansion
and product and production upgrading. These
collective agreements represent ‘local pacts
for production’: their intensification went
together with industrial upgrading that took
place since the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Management-union cooperation has thus
been crucial for upgrading: it is the intensified
exchange between labour and management
since the late 1990s that contributed to the
success of industrial upgrading in Eastern VW
subsidiaries. Collective agreements have been
examples of ‘productionist’ attitudes shared
by local management and trade unions. The
productionist legacy of state socialist era has
thus been preserved even if in a very different
institutional form.
IV. INDUSTRIAL CAPABILITIES AS AN ISSUE OF
PUBLIC CONCERN
During state socialism, public ownership of
enterprises was not a monetary ownership
– profits could not be re-invested. Rather, it
was ownership that represented a control
of allocation of productive resources. As
abundance of productive resources was mostly
linked to high employment figures and all
related social provisions, large industrial
projects were also high prestige projects. Thus,
although in state socialism there was no free
public media or free civil society and, thus,
no means for the public to express its opinion
about industrial policies or similar, large
industrial projects still enjoyed high status and
prestige. Furthermore, even if the decisions
concerning industrial priorities might have
served more the particularistic interests of the
Communist Party officials than the broad goals
of economic development, the official version
of events presented company affairs as an issue
of public concern. This section shows
how, to a certain extent, this rationale
of industrial capabilities being an
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issue of public concern has been
preserved from state socialist period
to the current day. What has survived is the
idea that enterprise is not just an issue between
employees and management of a particular