Adam Mrozowicki, Institute of Sociology, University of Wroclaw

Adam Mrozowicki, Institute of Sociology, University of Wroclaw Triin Roosalu, Institute of International and Social Studies, Tallinn University Tatiana Bajuk Senčar, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Slovenian Ethnology

Precarious work and trade union responses to the economic crisis in the retail sector in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia

Abstract: This article explores the varieties of trade union responses to the expansion of precarious work in the retail sector in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia in the context of the global economic crisis. The empirical research is based on interviews with trade union leaders and case studies of large multinational food retail companies. The analysis of sector level union responses to the precarious work suggests the crisis has not deeply changed their path- dependent character. The most efficient union tactics, involving political mobilisation and sector-level collective bargaining aimed at halting the expansion of precarious work, were observed in the neo-corporatist system of industrial relations in Slovenia. By contrast, company-level collective bargaining and mobilisation were more advanced in two neoliberal systems, Estonia and Poland. In all three countries, the most important innovations were union-led campaigns aimed at increasing the awareness of the general public about precarious work.

Keywords: precarious workers, economic crisis, retail sector, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia

Introduction

The cyclic nature of economic development in labour markets suggests that during the times of economic crises, the bargaining power of labour decreases as the increasing unemployment enables employers to more easily replace more expensive, often unionised employees with full-time, ‘standard’ employment contracts. In compliance with this, one of the global effects of the economic and financial crisis since 2008 has been the further expansion of unstable precarious employment as a result of state-led policies aimed at

1 relaxing employment regulations and austerity measures adopted in the private and public sectors (ILO 2012: viii). By precarious employment we mean, in accordance with Kalleberg (2009: 2), ‘employment that is uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker.’ It can be suggested that the emergence of this kind of jobs has been ‘delayed’ in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, in which standard full-time employment was more often the norm as a result of their socialist legacy. For instance, the share of temporary and part-time jobs in the commerce sector was in 2002 still much lower in the prospective New Member States (NMS) of the EU than in the EU15 (Caprile 2004). Although a similar difference between NMS and the EU15 was noted with respect to part-time work in 2009 (Aumayr 2010), the share of temporary jobs in 2009 in some CEE countries (e.g. Poland and Slovenia) was already higher than in the EU15 (Eurostat LFS). It may therefore be argued that there was some perceived space for an increase of precarious jobs in retail and other sectors in 2000s. Following the argument on postcommunist in-excess labour (Ost 2009), one could even go as far as to claim that the emergence of precarious work was among the last steps still to be taken in CEE companies to overcome their ‘postcommunist’ status. So, how did this ‘last step’ take place? Was it indeed inevitable, and how did trade unions respond to the expansion of precarious work? We argue that these tendencies towards precarisation were deepened by the economic crisis. Yet, their scope was mitigated by existing industrial relations frameworks. We make this claim based on our study of the case of retail sector in which employee representation and collective bargaining are generally less developed than in other sectors but precarious jobs are widespread (Adam, 2011; Grugulis and Bozkurt 2011). The existing comparative research suggests that retail sector employers are prone to utilize non-standard employment in response to increasing cost-driven competition in the sector. The forms of atypical employment (e.g. mini jobs, part-time employment and temporary agency work) reflect the labour market regulations in a given national context. Hence, the guiding question of this article: what were trade union responses both at the company and sector level to the further expansion of non-standard, precarious employment during the economic downturn in various institutional settings in CEE? We claim that the retail sector presents a good case for the analysis of trade union tactics of coping with the issue of precarious work in the context of the global financial and economic crisis for several reasons. First, the retail sector in CEE was not as hardly hit by the crisis as other sectors and it began to quickly recover after 2009. In this context, it could be expected that the adoption of various austerity measures by employers, including non- standard forms of employment, do not just represent a strategy of coping with the crisis but

2 also of making use of the ‘crisis discourse’ to reduce labour costs and thus secure competitiveness for the future. Second, given the low unionisation of the retail sector, the negotiated crisis-related measures to maintain employment and counteract precarious work were likely to be limited compared, for instance, to the manufacturing sector (cf. Glassner et al. 2011). Third, the study makes it possible to explore more general mechanisms that underlie both the emergence of negotiated, collective bargaining-related responses and unilateral union tactics, including recruitment and organising, renewal and changes in union internal structures, political responses and new forms of societal engagement (cf. Gumbrell- McCormick 2011). Hence, our guiding question: which of these strategies were used by trade unions in various institutional contexts in CEE, and why? Addressing the above sketched problems, we set out by presenting an overview of the methodological framework of empirical research we undertook in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia. Subsequently, we discuss industrial relations and employment practices in the retail sector in the three countries before (2008) and during the crisis (2009, 2010). Next, we explore the responses of trade unions to precarious employment during the economic downturn, first at the sectoral level and thereafter at the company level, based on six multinational hypermarket chains. In the conclusion, we discuss the effects of collective bargaining and employers’ and trade union actions on the change and continuity of employment practices in the retail sector during the economic downturn.

Methodology

To understand how the characteristics of the industrial relations systems shape union responses to the crisis and precarious work in the retail sector, we build on the typology of three kinds of CEE postsocialist political economies (Bohle and Greskovits 2007). The capitalist regimes that emerged in these countries after the end of state socialism range from ‘neoliberal’, characteristic to the Baltic states (here represented by Estonia), through the ‘embedded neoliberal regime’ of the Vysegrad countries (represented by Poland) to the ‘neo- corporatist’ regime in Slovenia. The former two are characterised, among other things, by the dominance of decentralised, single employer bargaining. Contrastingly, Slovenia represents a system in which multi-employer bargaining at the sectoral level is dominant. Existing research suggests that the crisis may have different responses in different capitalist regimes. As argued by Glassner et al. (2011: 303), ‘collective bargaining responses to the crisis have been much more frequent in multi-employer bargaining systems than in single-employer

3 bargaining systems, both at sectoral and company level.’ Could we also see such differences in the retail sector among the countries studied? Empirical data for this study was derived from three types of sources. Firstly, to understand the role of the industrial relations context, we collected expert interviews with leaders of the major trade union federations active in the retail sector. They were supplemented by interviews with some national and, if appropriate, regional level union leaders. In the years 2009-2012, 14 interviews were collected in the three countries, covering following trade unions: NSZZ Solidarnosc, FZZPSPHiU (within OPZZ) and Workers’ Initiative (Poland); EAKL and its retail sector affiliates ESTAL and ETKA in Estonia; and ZSSS with its retail sector affiliate SDTS and STS-KS 90 (affiliated to KS ’90) in Slovenia. Secondly, we made use of the secondary data derived from the existing reports on industrial relations in the commerce sector by the Eurofound (Adam, 2011; Aumayr 2010; Caprile 2004) as well as information on employment and economic performance of the sector from Eurostat Structural Business Statistics, Labour Force Surveys and national statistical offices in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia. Thirdly, semi-structured interviews with company-level trade union leaders (at least two per company), existing press reports, and annual corporate reports of the companies studied were used for reconstructing company case studies. All company cases were made anonymous at the explicit request of some of our informants. For our empirical analysis we selected six large multinational companies (MNCs), hypermarket chains in the food retail segment. While the majority of the retail sector is composed of small and medium enterprises, we focus on the big transnational retailers, as they control an increasing share of the market and set the global employment trends in the sector (Dicken 2011). In selecting the cases for our sample, we had the following criteria in mind: that the company needed to be a large MNC belonging to the leading food retailers in the given national context and that it needed to have an active trade union so that collective bargaining could be undertaken at all. Focusing on MNCs, in most of which trade unions have been recently established, we expected to find more innovative approaches to tackle the challenges of the crisis and precarious work than in the case of older declining unions of postsocialist large shops. The cases were also diversified in terms of the extent to which they were affected by the crisis to explore the choices made by management and by unions in diverse conditions.

4 Industrial relations and employment practices in the retail sector: crisis?

To grasp trade union strategies in the retail sector during the crisis, it is necessary to present at first an overview of the normal industrial relations and employment practices in this sector. The retail sector is often characterised as the low-paid sector, where non-standard forms of employment, such as part-time work, temporary work and self-employment, are common and employee representation is less developed than in other sectors (Adam, 2011; Czarzasty, 2010, Carre et al. 2010). Faced with an increasing competition, retailers worldwide cut costs by technological advancements (e.g. self-scanning), organisational changes (e.g. new shops formats), increased customisation, and new employment practices. To bypass the existing regulations which determine local labour standards, such as minimum wages at the national or sectoral levels, employers can consider the non-standard forms of employment as an ‘exit’ option from costs related to standard employment (Carre et al. 2010: 255), and they are likely to do so in an increasingly competitive economic environment. Consequently, we can expect that the use of non-standard employment forms available in a given context might have increased in more difficult economic conditions during the crisis. In order to verify this expectation, we discuss briefly pre-crisis employment conditions and crisis-related developments in the retail sector. Pre-crisis employment conditions in the retail sector in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia had some common features, but they also reveal cross-country institutional differences. In the 1990s and 2000s, the number of employees and the employed in the sector has been continuously increasing, until 2008 (Adam, 2011). The retail sector is marked by relatively high feminisation and overrepresentation of young people. Similarly to other EU countries (Adam 2011), in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia the number of the sector’s employees was (and still is) smaller than the number of those working in this sector, indicating the relevance of non-standard employment (table 1). Yet, except for the self-employment in small local shops, the scope of numerical flexibility involving temporary and part-time employment in the retail was still much lower in CEE than in the EU15 countries in 2002 (Caprile 2004). For instance, temporary work was performed in retail by 7,7 per cent of women and 6,7 per cent of men in the (prospective) New Member States of the EU as compared to 12,7 per cent of women and 12,0 per cent of men in the EU15 countries in 2002 (ibidem). Thus, the precarisation in the sector in early 2000s was reflected in chronically low wages, irregular work schedules, continuous work intensification and some violations of health and safety regulations.

5 Table 1: Selected employment and labour relations features of the retail sector Estonia Poland Slovenia 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 Number of 200 41 42 561 1 207 46, 49 53 91, (1) employees, 2 271 742 96,6 335 210 5 305 982 3 (2) the employed 200 49 50 936 1 398 66, 52 56 93, (3) share of 8 278 272 98,0 246 518 9 367 099 3 employees in the 201 employed (in %)1 0 43 44 892 1 291 69, 51 55 92, 487 842 97,0 848 614 1 707 754 7 Share of 200 - 7,3 12,5 temporary 0 employees (%)2 200 1,0 34,1 20,3 8 2011 3,0 34,3 20,0

Share of part-time 200 6,9 11,0 3,5 employees (%)3 0 200 7,7 7,9 8,8 8 2011 8,9 8,0 10,9 Change in the number of - 11,75% - 4,63% -1,26% employees 2008-20104

Personnel costs change - 19,95 % - 5,37 % + 3,99 % 2008-20105 Union density6 1 - 2% 1 – 2,5% > 18% Sectoral collective No No Yes agreement (2006-2013)

Sources: (1,4,5) Eurostat, Structural Business Statistics for Retail trade, except of motor vehicles and motorcycles ; for 4 and 5 – own calculations, no comparable data on the number of employed for the retail sector for 2000 available; (2) For Poland and Slovenia, own calculations based on Eurostat, Labour Force Survey, data for wholesale and retail trade (Nace G45-47, no lower aggregation available), for Estonia, own calculations based on Estonian Labour Force Survey (Estonian Statistical Office), retail trade except motor vehicles and motorcycles, everyone reporting working without written permanent contract; (3) own calculations based on Eurostat, Labour Force Survey ((Nace G45- 47); (6) Data for commerce sector (Nace G45-47) from Adam (2011); higher level of union density estimated for the retail only based on primary union statistics.

The expansion of non-standard employment began in the mid 2000s with the labour shortages in quickly developing sectors. This was combined with the adoption of changes to labour codes promoting more flexible employment in 2002-2003 in Poland, in 2006 in Slovenia and in 2009 in Estonia. In Estonia and Poland, labour shortages in the retail sector were also provoked by migration abroad after the EU enlargement (see Meardi 2012). Combined with low unemployment levels and higher labour market bargaining power of

6 workers in the mid 2000s, migration led to scarcity of qualified workforce willing to work in the low-paying jobs. Filling the gaps, retail companies began to experiment more with non- standard forms of employment. In Estonia and Slovenia, this meant an increase in the share of part-time workers in the wholesale and retail sectors between 2000 and 2008. In Poland, the non-standard employment meant a steep increase in the share of temporary employees (in wholesale and retail) from 7,3 per cent in 2000 to 34,1 per cent in 2008; the latter figure being much above the EU15 average (12,8 per cent in 2008). A similar tendency was also observed in Slovenia, in which the number of temporary workers in wholesale and retail increased from 12,5 per cent in 2000 to 20,3 per cent in 2008 (see table 1). Both before and during the crisis, industrial relations in the retail sector clearly reflected and continuously revealed institutional differences among three countries studied (table 1). In neo-corporatist Slovenia, retail sector wages are regulated by sectoral collective agreements (first signed in 2006) that are binding for all enterprises in the sector. However, the agreements do not regulate the salaries of student workers, who are employed through a student employment agency. Union density in the Slovenian retail sector is relatively high (more than 18 per cent), but still lower than in the whole economy. In neoliberal Estonia and Poland, two countries with decentralised, single-employer bargaining, there is no sectoral level collective agreement, company-level collective agreements are very rare, and trade union density is not higher than around 1 - 2 per cent. Until recently, eroding trade unions were mostly present in old, ‘post-socialist’ cooperative shops. This situation began to change since the late 1990s (in Poland) and the mid 2000s (in Estonia) with trade union organising campaigns targeting large hypermarket chains. Yet, until 2008, it was only in Estonia that union organising led to company-level collective agreement, and just in one shop. In Poland, ‘cooperation agreements’ were signed between unions and employers in 3 hypermarket chains enabling trade union access to employees within the enterprises.

Table 2. Changes in turnover in the retail, construction and manufacturing sectors in 2008- 2010 (in %) Retail trade Construction Manufacturing Estonia -14,3 % -43,4% - 6,2% Poland - 6,5% -2,9% - 6,5 % Slovenia -5,6% - 28% - 11,8 %

Source: Eurostat Structural Business Statistics (SBS), own calculations

7 The outcomes of the economic and financial crisis for retail in the CEE can be described by two main observations. Firstly, in terms of turnover (see table 2), the sector has been hit by the crisis to similar extent as manufacturing, but less than the construction sector (except for Poland due to public investments in construction in preparation to the UEFA Euro 2012). The crisis hit mostly small retailers, while at the same time the expansion of the segment of discount shops and multinational convenience stores was observed across the region creating competitive pressure on both small retailers and shops of larger formats (PMR 2011). The continuous expansion of retailers offering lower priced daily products may be explained by the falling purchasing power of the populations in those countries during the crisis, so that demand on discounted products actually might have grown. Secondly, trade union activists whom we interviewed emphasised that the discourse of the crisis has been used by employers as an ‘excuse’ to further decrease labour costs, intensify work and flexibilize employment in their companies. In terms of the number of employees, Estonia has observed the strongest job losses in retail sector among three countries studied (around 11,75 per cent in 2008-2010), followed by Poland (4,63 per cent) and Slovenia (1,26 per cent) (see table 1). Available Eurostat data (table 1) on the personnel costs in the sector in Poland and Estonia suggest that the latter declined in 2008-2009 faster than the overall decline of the number of employees, which allows us to suggest that the crisis led in these two countries to the reduction of the costs of employment. In Poland, the main effects of the crisis for employment conditions in the sector included the further expansion of temporary agency work (up to 50 per cent of the staff in some hypermarkets) and slight increase in the share of part-time work (table 1). The share of workers with contracts of limited duration in the commerce sector stood at the very high level of 34,3 per cent in 2011 (compared to 26,9 per cent nationwide). The anti-crisis legislation from July 2009 made it possible to conclude an unlimited number of fixed-term contracts for a period of up to 24 months creating an opportunity to further flexibilise employment. In Estonia, the redundancies of workers hired in the context of the pre-crisis labour shortages, many of which were Russian-speaking, was facilitated by the new Employment Contracts Act implemented in June 2009 despite trade union opposition. The act simplified dismissal procedures and made it easier to conclude fixed-term contracts. The crisis has also contributed to the decline of average wages in the retail sector by 2,3 per cent between 2009 and 2010. Nationwide, the share of employees on the temporary work contracts increased, from 2,1 per cent in 2007 to 4,5 per cent 2012 (Eurostat). Meanwhile, the share of part-time employees in the commerce sector increased to 8,9 per cent in 2011 (table 1).

8 In Slovenia, the strategy of cutting labour costs seemed to be less applied. Personnel costs grew in 2008-2010 due to an annex to the collective agreement raising minimum wage in 2009. However, in the Slovenian context, the crisis has also led to the deterioration of employment conditions through the reduction of the number of full-time workers after mass retirements in 2010 and their replacement by employees on temporary and part-time contracts (mostly students). The share of part-time employees grew over the crisis period to 10,9 per cent. Our interviewees suggested that the usage of temporary contracts was also widespread, up to 25 per cent in some shops (20 per cent in the commerce sector in 2011, see table 1).

Trade union responses to the crisis and precarious work: sectoral level

The analysis suggests that the expansion of precarious work in the retail sector in Estonia, Poland and, to lesser degree, Slovenia was institutionally mediated. The low level of employee organisation in retail in Estonia and Poland reflects more general features of single- employer collective bargaining systems and translates into more labour market insecurity of workers as compared to multi-employer collective bargaining system in neo-corporatist Slovenia. Did trade union responses to the further expansion of precarious work in the course of the economic crisis also reflect these institutional differences? We can distinguish three possible scenarios (Gumbrell-McCormick 2011; Kalleberg 2009; Kretsos 2011). Firstly, trade unions might focus on counteracting the expansion of precarious work via sectoral level collective bargaining and tripartite negotiations. Secondly, they can remain passive and avoid the issue of precarious work in their agendas. Thirdly, lacking collective bargaining leverage, they might act unilaterally to tackle the problem of precarious work during the crisis by legislative lobbying and political campaigns, community and social movement unionism, comprehensive and/or grass roots organising campaigns and revisions to union internal structures. Thus, the guiding question for this section is: which ‘negotiated’ and ‘unilateral’ measures to address the problems of precarious work during the crisis were used by CEE trade unions in the retail sector, and why these and not others? Exploring the first mentioned scenario, Glassner et al. (2011: 311-312) provided a list of negotiated measures to protect jobs that were used during the crisis in other sectors. They include short-time work schemes, actions to prevent or mitigate job loss (e.g. employee leasing), support for redundant workers (e.g. trainings), wage moderation and greater flexibility or decentralization of wage setting. As expected, such negotiated measures were almost absent in the single-employer collective bargaining systems in Poland and Estonia due

9 to limited union power and lacking employers’ organisation representativeness at the sectoral level as well as rather ineffective, or ‘illusory’ (Ost 2011) social dialogue at the national level. In neo-corporatist Slovenia, the developments took a different direction. Minimum wage for the retail sector was raised in 2009 with an annex to the sectoral collective agreement. In 2011, trade unions also managed to negotiate another annex to the sectoral collective agreement which harmonised wage increases of all wage grades in accordance with the new minimum wage. Notably, other measures such as education and training or short-time work schemes were not included in negotiations. In the absence of efficient collective bargaining instruments to tackle the issue of precarious work, the retail sector trade unions did not remain passive, but they have retreated to other, unilateral and mobilisation-based tactics. The first of them were nationwide political campaigns against the expansion of precarious employment during the crisis that were initiated and led by unions in Poland and Slovenia and, to a lesser degree, in Estonia. Notably, the only truly successful campaign took place in Slovenia, where union mobilisation contributed to voting down the law on temporary work (mini jobs) in 2011 in a nationwide referendum. In Poland, the retail trade unions organised demonstrations and actions against temporary (‘junk’) contracts in 2011-12 and in the nationwide campaign of NSZZ Solidarnosc to fix the minimum wage at 50 per cent of the national average. Yet, no legislative changes followed. In Estonia, the minimum wage was frozen at the level of 278 EUR from 2008 till 2012 despite ongoing tripartite negotiations and union pressure to raise it. The second tactic involved various forms of recruitment and organising, directly or indirectly addressing the problems of low-paid and unstable employment. In this case, we can talk about the path-dependent development of pre-crisis union strategies. In Estonia and Slovenia, the retail sector trade unions made use of earlier amendments in their statuses that allowed for individual membership of employees in micro-companies who suffered most the negative outcomes of economic downturn. In Estonia, ETKA professionalised its approach to membership recruitment, employing trade union organisers and joining a new project of Baltic Organising Academy financially supported by Nordic trade unions (Nordic In). In Poland, centrally-led trade union organising campaigns by NSZZ Solidarność in the retail sector gained new momentum with the campaign in the Kaufland hypermarket in 2010. It resulted in acquiring over 1000 employees in one year (2010), a pay increase of 25-50 EUR and the transformation of existing temporary contracts to open-ended contracts for all employees. However, NSZZ Solidarność has not directly targeted those on the civil-law, temporary (‘junk’) contracts in its organising approach.

10 The third tactic involved mass media and public campaigns. In August 2011, NSZZ Solidarność launched a webpage ‘hyper-exploitation’ (hiperwyzysk.pl) which allowed the retail sector employees to anonymously voice their concerns about the issues of pays and working conditions in their companies. The union has widely publicised its protests against work on Sundays, work intensification and employment reductions in several hypermarket chains. Information campaigns were also launched by the ETKA in Estonia, concerning the company cases of salary cuts and, with support of EAKL, the new Employment Contract Act that made layoffs easier. Similarly, mass-media was used by trade unions (spearheaded by the national level confederation ZSSS and its sectoral affiliates, including SDTS) in Slovenian campaigns against mini jobs. It can be argued that attracting attention of the general public to the negative aspects of low-paid and unstable jobs has been the main symbolic innovation on the side of trade unions in the countries studied. It denotes a qualitative change as compared to earlier strategies of CEE trade unions, which rarely opposed against the expansion of flexible employment (Trappmann 2011). However, other union strategies were rather path-dependent, with the dominance of (rather limited) ‘negotiated’ responses in Slovenia and unilateral actions in Estonia and Poland, mostly related to company-centred union organising, which was also present before the crisis. Notably, social movement unionism and new, community-based forms of worker organisation, which in other contexts were used to represent workers deprived of standard employment contracts (Kalleberg 2009; Kretsos 2011), were almost absent in the countries studied, except for the experiments of small, radical unions in Poland (e.g. the anarcho-syndicalist All-Poland Trade Union Workers’ Initiative).

Company trade union tactics to tackle the problems of precarious workers

As a result of sectoral union weakness in Poland and Estonia, as well as the dominance of single-employer bargaining systems in these countries, we expected that employers would have more leeway to unilaterally reduce labour costs as compared to the multi-employer collective bargaining system in Slovenia (Glassner et al. 2011: 315). A closer look at the selected multinational companies in the food retail segment makes it possible to examine such an expectation. The companies selected include EER1 and EER2 in Estonia, PLR1 and PLR2 in Poland, and SIR1 and SIR2 in Slovenia. They are among the top five retailers in terms of turnover, sales and employment in the food retail segment in the countries studied. Their economic situation during the years of the crisis was typical for large, multinational retail

11 companies as such, i.e. their economic performance was only moderately and temporarily affected by the economic downturn in 2008-2011. And yet, their managements decided to make use of the crisis situation to reduce employment costs and secure a competitive advantage for the future. This, in turn, contributed to the further expansion of precarious jobs. The unilateral measures adopted by management in the companies studied included (1) temporary salary reductions administered directly (in EER1) or indirectly (in SIR1, via reduction of variable pay components not regulated by company-level collective agreement); (2) work intensification as a result of increasing area of sales/expansion (in all cases), rising norms for employees to qualify for performance bonuses (PLR2), introducing just-in-time principles (PLR1), extending working hours (EER1); (3) non-negotiated lay-offs, including 11 people in EER1 and the replacement of around 12 000 of the PLR1 permanent staff by temporary agency workers; (4) unilateral and accelerated expansion of temporary contracts replacing standard employment, especially in the Slovenian and Polish cases. Trade union responses to management’s strategies represented roughly three types of union actions: (1) monitoring the implementation of sectoral level collective agreement (dominant in Slovenia); (2) developing company-level collective bargaining resulting in new or renewed collective agreements (dominant in Estonia); (3) undertaking unilateral actions to counteract atypical employment in the context of lack of collective agreements (dominant in Poland). In Slovenia, the role of trade unions was generally diminished to dealing with individual cases of infractions of sectoral level collective agreement. Actions aimed at counteracting work intensification and non-standard employment were limited. In terms of wage negotiations, more successful were unions in SIR1. With the aid of a media campaign spurred by the publication of anonymous letters written by employees, trade union representatives negotiated an annex to the company level agreement and increase variable wage components. In SIR2, negotiations of a company level collective agreement were stalled due to irreconcilable positions of both sides. In the case of EER1 and EER2 in Estonia, the crisis intensified company level collective bargaining, which was also supported by sectoral trade union federations. Initially, the experiences of crisis-related collective bargaining in EER1 were rather negative. The management decided to unilaterally decrease wages in 2010 (despite the regulations in the collective agreement, in place since 2008) and ignored trade union attempts to negotiate one- time salary reductions in 2010 in exchange for raising wages in 2011 through an annex to the collective agreement. Yet, partially as a result of the mass-media campaign initiated by ETKA (sectoral union), the company did bring wages back to the pre-crisis level in 2011 and

12 renewed its collective agreement. In EER2, trade union leaders suggested that the crisis had no effect on internal negotiations. Yet, it was during the period of crisis that the union and the management entered into the negotiations of collective agreement; this was a new element of employment relations in EER2 which did not exist before the crisis. The agreement was concluded in November 2011 and included regulations that were more generous than national legal requirements (e.g. in terms of provisions of bonuses and holidays). Separate wage negotiations started in autumn 2011 and were concluded in April 2012 with an average wage increase by 10 per cent. Overall, in both Estonian cases, the issue of precarious work was addressed more in terms of wages than employment contracts. In the case of two MNCs subsidiaries in Poland, no collective agreements existed before the crisis and they were not concluded during the crisis either, mostly due to the employers’ fear to lose their competitiveness. In this context, trade unions retreated to public protests in the front of hypermarkets and mass media campaigns, with significant support of NSZZ Solidarnosc Commerce Section. The issues of the expansion of ‘junk jobs’ in PLR2 and the replacement of permanent workers by employees hired via temporary agencies (PLR1) were highlighted. In PLR1, the union and management did manage to negotiate some measures alleviating precarious employment, most notably the transformation of 5000 fixed- term contracts to open-ended contracts in 2011 and a new policy guarantying open-ended contracts for the PLR1 employees with seniority longer than 15 months (from January 2011). In PLR2, trade unions in cooperation with NGOs exerted continuous pressure on the company to raise wages. As a result, the current minimum wage (1870 PLN gross) in the PLR2 discount shops is the highest in the retail chains. The PLR2 unions also initiated an open letter to the UEFA president, Michel Platini, in which the company, as one of the sponsors of the Polish football team during the European Football Cup 2012, was accused for misusing short- term contracts to get rid of union activists. Although the PLR2 union campaign against the short-term job contracts did not bring tangible outcomes so far (as compared to PLR1), it provided a background for future actions by making the issue of ‘junk jobs’ in PLR1 public.

Conclusions

This article addressed the problem of trade union responses to the effects of the economic and financial crisis in the retail sector in Estonia, Poland and Slovenia. Our analysis suggests that the situation of the crisis allowed for more leeway to accelerate, deepen and justify the further expansion of low paid and unstable employment by retail sector employers.

13 Notably, this expansion took place despite rather limited impact of the crisis on the profits of the leading, mostly multinational retail companies in CEE. In accordance to earlier research (Carre et al. 2010; Glassner et al. 2011; Kalleberg 2009), the extent and forms of employment precarisation were shaped by the opportunities to counteract it by trade unions in a given national industrial relations context. As argued by Kalleberg (2009: 15), ‘the degree to which employers can shift risks to employees depends on workers’ relative power and control’. Thus, exploring trade union approaches to the problem of precarious work, we expected to find more sectoral-level collective bargaining responses in the multi-employer bargaining system of neo-corporatist Slovenia and more unilateral union actions and company-level responses in the case of single-employer systems of Poland and Estonia. Our analysis partially confirms this expectation. The situation of the crisis did not mark a radical discontinuity, but rather the continuation of earlier trade union approaches to the problems of precarious workers. The most important of tactics included company-centred trade union organising (Poland, Estonia) and sector-level collective bargaining (Slovenia). As expected, sectoral level collective bargaining was absent in the retail sector in the neoliberal systems of Poland and Estonia. However, even in the case of neo-corporatist Slovenia, the ‘integrative’ type of sectoral collective bargaining (Glassner et al. 2011), which could provide win-win solutions for workers and employers (such as requalification or working time adjustments to save jobs) has not been used. Moreover, collective bargaining was focused on issues of wage moderation and improvement rather than on problems of unstable employment. In two single-employer bargaining systems, Poland and Estonia, more tangible trade union achievements were noted at the company level than in the case of Slovenia, reflecting successful company-level collective bargaining (dominant in Estonia) and/or public protests and campaigns (dominant in Poland, but also present in Estonia). Their results included pay increases, transformations of temporary contracts into more secure, open-ended contracts, or, in Estonia, signing and extending collective agreements in transnational retail companies. Notably, in Slovenia virtually no progress in company collective bargaining was observed as employers tended to adhere to the minimum regulations of sector-level collective bargaining and adopted a much more voluntaristic approach in areas not regulated at higher levels. Although trade union tactics towards precarious workers did not dramatically change during the crisis, it would be misleading to claim that they remained entirely locked in their earlier approaches. The most important innovations were mass media and political campaigns against ‘junk jobs’ (in Poland), ‘mini jobs’ (in Slovenia) and new, more ‘flexible’

14 Employment Contracts Act (in Estonia). Addressing the expansion of unstable employment as not fully justified by the economic situation of employers, these campaigns added a new element to the public discourses in CEE. Even though their immediate effects might be still limited (especially in Poland and Estonia), the issue of precarious work has certainly gained more prominent place in trade union agendas as compared to the pre-crisis situation (Trappmann 2011). It remains to be seen to what extent this qualitative change will be translated into new strategies to tackle the problems of precarious workers in the future.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Vera Glassner and two anonymous reviewers for their critical, but useful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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