Repertoire of Socioeconomic Contention: Evidence from Post-Socialist Countries

In his lecture, Jiří Navrátil, scholar of the Masaryk University, will argue that for several decades, organized labor in many countries has faced two systemic challenges that led to its transformation. First, the changing structure of the economy led to a changing structure of employment in terms of a rising platform economy, labor market dualization, and increasing service and knowledge employment where trade unions never existed or hardly found any new members (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013). Second, neoliberal policies became widely perceived as the only economic game in town, stressing economic deregulation, strict fiscal policies, adjustment to international markets, and weakening the political role of labor in general (Streeck 2016). These profound, interconnected transformations led not only to the worsening of the position and capacities of organized labor in many countries but also to the change of their repertoire—selected and shared tools of collective action—in the field of socioeconomic contention in general.