| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Stephen Crowley and David Ost, eds., Workers After Workers' States: Labour and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2001).

STEPHEN CROWLEY and David Ost have edited a valuable collection of studies of labour and the Eastern European transition that has much to offer a wider audience. The country chapters and the editors' introduction and conclusion attempt to explain why, in the face of the horrific economic crisis, there has not only been little sustained labour protest but labour as an institutional force remains weak.

Although the editors did not impose a common framework, the authors elaborate similar themes which give the book considerable coherence. One theme is implicit in all, namely that the "elites" which consolidated their power did so at the expense of the mass of the population and the transition was therefore about class issues. The question is why, in the face of this, did class formation not occur at the bottom?

One way of measuring class formation is in terms of social protest. Strikes have taken place but they have tended to be what Crowley and Ost term "strikes of despair." These defensive actions have been most evident amongst miners, transport workers (especially rail), health and education workers but they have often had a lightning character. Workers as a whole have not been able to turn justifiable grievances into a means of mobilization. A second aspect of class formation is more organizational. Why have trade unions proved so weak? Crowley and Ost summarize the situation by noting that union density has dropped to about one third of the workforce in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, two fifths in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia, half in Serbia, and two thirds in Russia and the Ukraine. In comparative terms these figures are not unrespectable and, paradoxically, the reformed Communist trade unions remain, in most countries, the largest civic organizations. But real strength relies on the ability to persuade government, to have some national political representation, and to win collective bargaining in the workplace. Here the record, as each author shows, is poor in every country examined. At the bottom workplace representation is weak and at the top unions have, at best, secured an "illusory corporatism."

To explain this the authors discuss how material factors — real wage cuts, wage arrears, unemployment, and mass poverty — have undercut the capacity of workers to resist a deterioration in their conditions. Organizational-resource factors have also affected the capacity of unions to reform, adjust and sustain activity at appropriate levels though the editors suggest that official unions did quite well in the formal transfer of physical resources. The biggest problem, Crowley and Ost suggest, is that of ideas and identities. They are led to this conclusion by the fact that despite the variation in economic conditions, state institutions, and organizational resources, labour organizations remain weak suggesting that there may be a common third factor at work. This is a crisis in socialist ideology that has served to delegitimize class cleavages in favour of identity-based cleavages.

As a group the authors share the view that this labour weakness has vitiated the possibly of a more democratic transition. Indeed several authors allude to the possibility that labour's weakness has helped to create a space for xenophobic nationalism and far right politics to develop. But it might also be argued ( with the possible exception of the former Yugoslavia and even there organization on a nationalist basis has been intermittent) that the factors that have weakened labour's capacity to mobilize have also made it difficult for the far right to capitalize on the unfocused anger that the authors show exists. What is interesting in this sense is the comparative freedom of manoeuvre that those running these societies have had to manipulate the transition in their wider interest.

But a bigger issue surfaces at a number of points and this is reflected in the title of the book. Crowley and Ost begin by pointing out that many expected labour to be more prominent in the transition since labour appeared to be central to the old system. Yet at various points the editors and different authors also point to the way that labour suffered in the old societies and how misleading were the propaganda claims, even about Yugoslav self-management. What then was the nature of this system of "workers' states" in which real workers played so limited a role? This is not just an abstract question. If workers had been sold a lie, if they were exploited, if they were denied the capacity for independent organization then there was no reason to expect that they would have so strong a presence in the transition. That could only come with sustained struggles at the base. Some spectacular explosions did occur in 1989–1991 but labour did not experience a sustained mobilization that could be translated into a strong and independent base.

But one possible implication of this argument is that a top-down transformation or restructuring of both society at large, and "trade unions" within this, was bound to be alienating since what was really needed was a bottom-up change. In these terms labour has not fallen from grace ( as a real indication of the position of workers in a "workers' state" [sic] consider the fact that nearly 200,000 workers were killed at work in the last two decades of the old USSR when things were improving). If this is right, although it is difficult to disagree with the pessimism of the book in terms of the problems of the mass of the population in the transition, perhaps a more positive view could have been taken both analytically and politically of the struggles that have occurred and continue to occur. It is out of these that we are likely to see a stronger labour movement eventually emerge.

How these struggles in the future might relate to the existing labour organizations is an important problem. In the first days of the transition it seemed as if new unofficial unions might displace the discredited state ones. But this has not occurred. Each of the national chapters shows that they remain as weak, indeed often weaker than reformed old organizations. To this extent any rebuilding of unions that does occur may have to start with the material at hand even if it is of doubtful quality.

Perhaps the most effective help that can come from outside is in showing the value of basic trade union principles and methods. But whether in the form of the International Labour Organization, the European Union, Western trade unions, and many Western academics, much of the advice and help that did come in the 1990s focused more on illusions of creating top-down tripartite structures. That these could not work without a real base is evident from the discussions here.

But readers should be encouraged to explore such themes for themselves and they will be better able to do so on the basis of the rich material in Crowley and Ost's collection.


Michael Haynes University of Wolverhampton

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