Documents Slovakia 238 results

"The paper provides an overview of government and social partner responses. In describing responses, the main goal of this paper is to identify the dimensions that can help explain the variety of responses, but also their commonalities. The paper also aims at understanding the factors that may have promoted the activation of social dialogue over economic and social policies and broaden the role of collective bargaining and industrial relations, as opposed to unilateral interventions designed by national governments. The paper lays out an analytical framework based on the COVID impact in each country, national industrial relations institutions and the nature of the government in office. In this general framework, we observe how national industrial relations institutions play a key role in explaining the responses in terms of the level and quality of social dialogue and the role of collective bargaining. Particularly important has been the role of strong sectoral collective bargaining institutions, allowing sectoral actors to negotiate specific responses considering the impact and the needs of the sector."

"This paper aims to verify the relationship between minimum wage growth and the financial indicators of automotive companies. As a hi-tech sector, the automotive industry is usually not expected to be affected by minimum wage policies. The introduction of the minimum wage in Germany and the dynamic development of the minimum wage in Eastern European countries make it possible to assess this relationship. German, Czech, Polish, and Slovak automotive company data was obtained from the Orbis database. Panel regression models were applied to test for dependencies. The paper detects the association between the growth of the minimum wage and the increase in personnel cost, which is next to the associations with several financial indicators at the company level. The identified impact is specific to small and medium-sized companies."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

"This book presents the issue of access to information in the posting of workers. The authors identify and assess the practices and challenges of construction companies involved in the posting of workers, either as posting companies sending their workers to provide a service from one European Union (EU) country to another or as a user company that receives the services provided by posting companies and their posted workers. The chapters in this book contribute to the debates on the posting of workers by filling a gap in understanding how transnational posting companies and user or receiving companies find and use information in their interaction with national institutions and how that affects their overall performance in terms of the correct application of the posting rules and the protection of labour and social standards. The studies focus on the specific case of the construction sector as one of the main sectors where posting occurs and where both larger companies and SMEs as well as self-employed are active. Consequently, this sector covers a great diversity of “companies”, allowing for a stratified understanding of posting and receiving companies' challenges."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"We investigate the conditions under which state reformers in postcommunist Europe can implement radical policies aimed at boosting investment now that the fundamental institutions of a market economy are in place. Surprisingly, such reforms are now being pioneered by those countries considered laggards of the first-generation, market-making reforms in the 1990s. Party system institutionalization offers the best explanation for who adopts second-generation reforms, to what degree, and when. Such institutionalization, which enhances vertical accountability between governments and voters, puts state reformers at a disadvantage in enacting second-generation reforms. By making it difficult to create a coherent and credible opposition against reform, underinstitutionalization insulates state reformers from social and political pressures, allowing them to undertake economic policies hard to envision in a more developed democracy. We test this hypothesis by comparing recent reform attempts in Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania."

"This article compares industrial relations in production sites in Slovakia and Russia owned by a single transnational automotive firm, Volkswagen. We analyse the empirical data using a working-class power approach. In Slovakia, associational and institutional power is well developed and influenced by the model of German work councils, but structural power is weakly exercised and unions rely on non-conflictual engagement with management. In Russia, structural working-class power remains strong, but the opportunities for transforming this into lasting associational, let alone institutional power, remain limited; thus, new unions make use of unconventional methods of protest to promote worker interests."

"Using the case study of Slovakia, this article considers the role of the state in the rapid growth of the automotive industry in integrated peripheral markets of the global automotive industry. Although this growth has been mainly driven by the investment strategies of automotive lead firms, the state has played an important role by accommodating the strategic needs of foreign capital through neoliberal economic policies. In addition to secondary sources, the empirical research is based on a 2010 survey of 299 Slovak-based automotive firms with a response rate of 44% and on 38 on-site firm-level interviews conducted between 2011 and 2013 and one in 2005. The analysis draws upon approaches in economic geography, international political economy and upon global value chains and global production networks perspectives to argue that the successful development of the automotive industry in Slovakia has been achieved at the expense of its overwhelming dependence on foreign capital and corporate capture. The article considers the potential consequences of dependent industrial development for the domestic automotive industry and its position in the international division of labor."