Introduction

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. The project was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council under its East–West Initiative and has provided a unique opportunity for comparative research into labour relations changes in eastern Europe. Changes within enterprises are being driven by a range of external processes within which political parties, national government processes and labour unions play key roles. The research also explores the extent to which new forms of tripartism and corporatism develop to condition enterprise level labour relations. Finally, many of the changes, as these are affecting labour relations, have as their “model” the practice of some Western countries.