Resisting the Great Recession: Social movement unionism in Croatia and Serbia

Danijela Dolenec, Daniela Širinić and Ana Balković
Additional contact information
Danijela Dolenec: University of Zagreb, Croatia
Daniela Širinić: University of Zagreb, Croatia
Ana Balković: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain; University of Zagreb, Croatia

European Journal of Industrial Relations, 2022, vol. 28, issue 1, 105-121

Abstract: Addressing the debate regarding the impact of the Great Recession on changing union strategies in post-socialist Europe, our analysis shows that in Croatia and Serbia the crisis, while depressing strike numbers, was nevertheless met with substantial union resistance. Developing a paired comparison and relying on protest event data for the period 2000–2017, we argue that the differences among the two countries’ respective varieties of capitalism drive divergent union strategies described as social movement unionism. In Serbia, the role of unions in protests articulating workers’ demands remained more central and unions were overall more present in the protest arena, while in Croatia, unions have exhibited stronger propensity to forge alliances and adopt innovative policy strategies. While taking on board scholarship that portrays social movement unionism as signalling union weakness, we argue that strategies which increase union mobilization capacity may also be understood as increasing union resilience in changing social circumstances.

Keywords: Post-socialism; protest event analysis; social movement unionism; strike data; union strategies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09596801211023270 (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:eurjou:v:28:y:2022:i:1:p:105-121

DOI: 10.1177/09596801211023270

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Journal of Industrial Relations
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().