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  • Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: From Solidarity to Infirmity
  • Stephen Crowley
Paul J. Kubicek . Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: From Solidarity to Infirmity. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. xiv + 256 pp. ISBN 0-8229-5856-2, $29.95 (paper).

Labor unions in formerly communist societies have gone, in just fifteen years, from being large and sometimes very powerful organizations—think of Poland's Solidarityto being much smaller and weaker organizations. In discussing this weakness, Paul Kubicek notes the irony that workers in communist societies "were able to organize to help overthrow a system that purportedly ruled in their name. However, they are poorly poised to do battle against governments and policies that make little pretense to serve their interests" (p. 206). The significance of this weakness goes beyond the postcommunist region itself since several of these countries, including Poland and Hungary, which are profiled in Kubicek's book, are now members of the European Union (EU).

Kubicek aims to explain this dramatic decline for labor in the region, as well as to sketch its further trajectory. While the argument about labor weakness in postcommunist societies is not entirely new, the author brings new evidence to bear. The book's most novel contribution is to connect this discussion of postcommunist labor weakness to the literature of globalization's impact on labor, leading to expectations of continued decline. Kubicek argues that most explanations [End Page 191] about labor weakness in the region have focused on the impact of the legacies of the communist period.

Kubicek agrees with, and his evidence supports, the importance of these legacies, but he notes the transitory nature of this factor, arguing it should have less impact over time. Thus, he notes a second broad factor—the various trends often referred to as globalization, which are also weakening unions in the West. Here, Kubicek considers not only the impact of foreign direct investment and international financial institutions on labor and unions but also structural changes in advanced capitalist economies, such as privatization, the shift from the industrial to the service sector, and the move from larger to smaller enterprises. These trends, Kubicek demonstrates, are also rapidly taking place in postcommunist economies, and their combined impact means that labor's problems in the region are not merely transitional but will continue as part of these larger global trends.

The empirical core of the book is made up of four country chapters that examine the changes that unions have faced in Poland, Russia, Hungary, and Ukraine. These are made up of a broad survey of available primary and secondary sources on this topic, and the author has read sources in three of the four languages from the countries he has surveyed, in addition to English. Kubicek also has interviewed a number of union officials at various levels in three of the countries. These chapters present a number of interesting findings. (The Polish chapter is the strongest, and the Hungarian chapter the least strong, of the four.)

Despite its considerable strengths, the book has some shortcomings. Just as it is hard to disentangle globalization from structural trends in advanced capitalism, it is difficult to draw a sharp line between the impact of postcommunist "reforms" and globalization. In places, Kubicek defines globalization narrowly as foreign direct investment, but in broader terms joining the West and opening up to the global market were central aims of the postcommunist transformations. Shock therapy in Poland, for example, largely entailed opening up the economy and reorienting it to the West, and thus it is hard to differentiate this process from "globalization."

Yet a greater shortcoming with the book is that while the conclusions are sound, their significance could be pushed a bit further. For example, while Kubicek argues that the impact of communist-era legacies will lessen over time, this misses the insights of institutional theories such as notions of path dependence, which suggest that other than certain critical junctures that create moments of institutional openness, institutional arrangements are shaped by lock-in effects and paths of increasing returns. The postcommunist transformations certainly were such a critical juncture, and one that has left [End Page 192] these societies with very weak...

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