EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The fate of labor after regime change: Lessons from post-communist Poland and post-apartheid South Africa for Tunisia’s Nobel-Prize winning unions

Ian M Hartshorn and Rudra Sil
Additional contact information
Ian M Hartshorn: University of Nevada Reno, USA
Rudra Sil: University of Pennsylvania, USA

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2019, vol. 40, issue 1, 20-41

Abstract: Wherever labor has played a significant role in bringing about regime change, there may be opportunities to join in the post-authoritarian ruling coalition in the hopes of consolidating its influence. This article examines the long-term risks and unanticipated consequences of giving in to this temptation by comparing post-communist Poland and post-apartheid South Africa, where the leading trade union federations became weaker and more divided as their political allies pushed forward with economic liberalization. Tunisia’s trade unions, awarded the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for their contribution to a stable transition after the ‘Arab Spring,’ face the risk of going down the same path should they continue to view themselves as partners of the new governing elite, which has already signaled its intention of pursuing further liberalization.

Keywords: Labor relations; neoliberalism; Poland; regime change; South Africa; trade unions; Tunisia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X18780321 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:40:y:2019:i:1:p:20-41

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X18780321

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:40:y:2019:i:1:p:20-41