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Liberalizaton Without Major Reforms: The Destandarization of Employment Relations in Central Eastern European Countries

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New Forms of Employment

Abstract

The following paper employs Kathleen Thelen’s concept of “trajectory” of liberalization to describe the changes in the area of employment regulation in Central Eastern European countries—Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia (CEECs). The paper argues that the institutional changes that took place in the recent years in the CEECs could be described as a new trajectory of liberalization of “destandarization” that consists of actions that are directly or indirectly violating or circumventing the law and that relies on weak mechanisms of surveillance and lack of sufficient actions from the policy makers on a political level. To substantiate the claim, paper reviews the data on the labor law violations from respective labor inspectorates, and other secondary data on the non-standard forms of employment from various sources. Conceptually, paper is influenced by historical institutionalism.

This paper was written as a part of the project “Polityka prawa pracy po początku kryzysu ekonomicznego w Polsce. Segmentacja rynku pracy i naruszenia prawa pracy” [Labor law policy after the economic crisis in Poland. Labor market segmentation and labor law violations], funded by the (Polish) National Science Centre on the basis of decision number UMO-2015/19/N/HS5/01227.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It has to be noted that Czechia and Slovakia formed one federal state – Czechoslovakia – until the dissolution in 1993.

  2. 2.

    The Czech Labor inspectorate (SUIP) report provides only data on selected most common breaches of particular legal provisions. No data on the overall number of infringements is provided in the report. I asked SUIP for the data, but no answer was given. The calculation is therefore made by summing up the numbers of the most common infringements provided in SUIP 2018, which amounts to 29,497. However, the total number of all infringements is probably much higher.

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  1. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Karol Muszyński

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  1. Karol Muszyński
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  1. Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland

    Jerzy Wratny

  2. University of Rzeszow, Rzeszów, Poland

    Agata Ludera-Ruszel

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Muszyński, K. (2020). Liberalizaton Without Major Reforms: The Destandarization of Employment Relations in Central Eastern European Countries. In: Wratny, J., Ludera-Ruszel, A. (eds) New Forms of Employment. Prekarisierung und soziale Entkopplung – transdisziplinäre Studien. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28511-1_4

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