Polish trade unions and social dumping debates

Magdalena Bernaciak
Additional contact information
Magdalena Bernaciak: European Trade Union Institute (ETUI)

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2016, vol. 22, issue 4, 505-519

Abstract: This article examines the stances of Polish trade unions on EU enlargement, intra-EU labour mobility and EU service market liberalization. It shows that, despite the liberal rhetoric embraced by mainstream media and successive Polish governments, the country’s labour organizations did not lend their support to the logic of low-cost competitiveness. The article accounts for this stance by referring to the insider-outsider theorem. It argues that whereas transnationally mobile workers and self-employed individuals (the ‘outsiders’) could make use of short-term cost advantages, the domestic workforce (the ‘insiders’) benefited from the gradual improvement of employment conditions in Poland and their convergence with western standards. The desire to cater to the interests of the insiders made the unions reject social dumping and defend the west European social ‘archetype’ to which their countrymen aspired.

Keywords: Trade unions; social dumping; EU eastern enlargement; labour mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1024258916667017 (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:treure:v:22:y:2016:i:4:p:505-519

DOI: 10.1177/1024258916667017

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().