ABSTRACT
It is the contention of this book that labour relations are a key constituent element in the transformation of eastern European and Russian society. At the national level, governments’ strategies of “shock therapy” or “gradualism” are tempered by the threat or potential for industrial unrest, and the trade unions have often played a critical role in mobilizing consent for economic reform. At enterprise level, attempts to transform the property structure and the relations of production are constrained and conditioned by the traditional approaches of management and workers developed over the long period of the command economy. The strength and persistence of these enterprise based patterns and habits varies from country to country, according to recent past policies of economic reform and the specific processes of regime collapse in each case. Nevertheless, in all cases labour relations at enterprise level remain of critical significance in the success or failure of different change strategies. The need to restructure the labour process and to introduce capitalist patterns of labour control are the necessary corollary of the attempt to transform the economy into a largely privately-owned market system. The difficulty of doing this in practice is what makes labour relations a key issue for regime change.
