ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three dimensions of Hungarian public sector employment: activities, legal statuses and organization of delivery. By exploring activities, we can find out what public sector workers actually do, what kind of duties they perform and how the services that the state delivers via its own employees have changed over time. A focus on legal status is justified by the country context. In Hungary, instead of collective bargaining, unilateral legislation determines the most important elements of employment conditions (including wages). Finally, by looking at the organization of public service delivery, we can also tell how much autonomy local governments or establishment-level managers have vis-à-vis the central government in terms of their relationship with employees. Tracking developments along these three dimensions over time provides the structure of the chapter. Three critical junctures will be identified over the period 1990-2015: the early years of the post-communist transition in the 1990s, the turn to austerity in 2006 and the changes that the conservative Orbán government enacted after 2010. In all three of these critical periods, significant changes are observed in all three dimensions.
