Trade unions in transnational automotive companies in Russia and Slovakia

“

We analyse the empirical data using a working class power approach (WCP) after Silver (2005), Wright (2000) and developed by Schmalz and Dörre (2014). By examining the Russian case in a comparative CEE context, we highlight the uneven development of WCP in postsocialist countries that all experienced a strong shift towards neoliberalism during the transition. In Russia, the embedding of neoliberalism in production relations remains patchy and incomplete. Unions, like workers, find ecological niches in changing political economies. In both cases, therefore, path-dependency of labour’s positioning in the specific types of capitalism emerging after socialism must be acknowledged, but is not the complete picture. The firm’s specific purposes in each post-socialist country account for the direction developed by employment relations at plant level. While the influence of actors of established industrial relations continues to be salient in the Slovak case, mainly serving the export goals set by the German headquarters, the same does not apply to the plant in Russia, exclusively built up to produce for Russian consumer markets and therefore not dependent on the goodwill of ‘superior’ plants. Thus far, employment relations from the German headquarters have limited effects on negotiation processes in Russia, leading to opportunities for path-dependent learning by young trade unions, which gain entry to the newly emerging transnational firms, an insight explored in other post-communist contexts by Meardi (2007).

”