Documents Gardawski, Juliusz 9 results

"Contributing to the literature on the diversity of capitalism, this article shows how actors in the Polish public services responded to interlinked crises, namely the chronic public services crisis and its aggravation by the COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of refugees triggered by war in Ukraine. The empirical part of our study is based on qualitative interviews with workers, trade unionists, managers and state representatives in education, healthcare and social care. Our analysis suggests that, when faced with an insufficient government response – for reasons reflecting the basic features of “patchwork capitalism” – workers' resourcefulness and self-organization helped maintain essential public services during the crises."

"The article compares the role of tripartism during and after democratic transitions in Spain and Poland. In both countries it emerged after a negotiated transition from dictatorship, but it was poorly institutionalised. While it fell short of ‘neocorporatist' levels of governance, it had a ‘foundational' function in stabilising both political and economic transitions, and despite its limitations, it endured for decades in the frequent, if unregular, practice of negotiating ‘social pacts'. The comparison reveals some striking similarities despite the contrasting economic systems of origin, and identifies some structural constants in the evolution of post-democratic tripartism, up to the recent crisis."

"The article looks at the evolution and institutional characteristics of Polish trade unions after 1989 in a pre-1989 historical context. It highlights the role of path-dependency in assessing labour's capacity to adapt to the new economic, political and social environment which emerged following the radical institutional change. Based on field work conducted in 2009 and 2010, the paper focuses on the dynamics in organisational structure of the three nation-wide trade union organisations (Solidarity, OPZZ and FZZ), and adds a concise description of national industrial relations, emphasizing their hybrid and foggy nature."

"This report on the trade union landscape in Poland forms part of a wide-ranging project, initiated and coordinated by the ETUI, which aims to map changes in unionisation and the varying organisational structures of unions in the ‘new member states' of the European Union. The current report on the trade union movement in Poland is a real tour de force, especially given the vast number of union organisations entailed. The fruit of this tremendous effort on the part of the country experts is a report that is simultaneously comprehensive and extremely rich in detail. In mapping the full broad gamut of Polish trade unions, they compellingly expose how much the trade union movement in this country is handicapped by its excessively decentralised structures; its chronic fragmentation and rivalry at the company level and above; and the dramatic decline in membership levels, particularly in absolute terms."