The nail in the coffin? Pandemic and social dialogue in Poland
| Date | 16 June 2023 |
| Pages | 62-78 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-06-2022-0289 |
| Published date | 16 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
| Author | Jan Czarzasty,Adam Mrozowicki |
The nail in the coffin? Pandemic
and social dialogue in Poland
Jan Czarzasty
Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Economic Sociology,
Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland, and
Adam Mrozowicki
Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław,
Wrocław, Poland
Abstract
Purpose –In the context of debates on the role of social partners in shaping anti-crisis policies, the article
explores the developments of social dialogue in Poland following the outbreak of the pandemic. The central
research question is whether the crisis has helped to revitalise social dialogue or has it further revealed its
weaknesses that were apparent before it.
Design/methodology/approach –The paper is based on the combination of literature review and the
analysis of primary data derived from 22 expert interviews with the representatives of trade unions, employers
and ministries collected in 2020–2021 in four essential industries (education, health care, social care and
logistics).
Findings –The analysis suggests that the pandemic led to reinforcement of “illusory corporatism”in Poland,
deepened mistrust among social partners and triggered a shift to informal channels of influencing
policymaking. The weakness of the social partners and the strong position of the right-wing populist
government meant that fears of recession and a health crisis were insufficient to develop “crisis”corporatism.
While business interests were represented better than labour in policymaking, limited labour-friendly
outcomes have been achieved as a result of workers’mobilisation and unilateral decisions of the government
rather than tripartite social dialogue.
Originality/value –Based on original empirical research, the article contributes to the discussion on the
impact of the crisis on social dialogue under patchwork capitalism. It points to the role of strong governments
and informality in circumventing tripartite structures and the importance of essentialworkers’mobilisation in
response to the lack of social dialogue.
Keywords Social dialogue, Tripartism, Pandemic, Poland, Crisis, Trade unions, Path dependency
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 was initially seen as an unprecedented event, likely to trigger
a radical type of social change. Three years later, however, with the pandemic still present but
apparently past its momentum, the views have become much more nuanced and balanced.
The existing studies suggest that the role of social dialogue in managing pandemic crisis has
been path-dependent: the countries with traditions of social partnership cooperation made
use of social dialogue more extensively than those with more fragmented industrial relations
ER
45,7
62
© Jan Czarzasty and Adam Mrozowicki. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is
published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce,
distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial
purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence
may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
This article was prepared within the project COV-WORK (“Socio-economic consciousness, work
experiences and coping strategies of Poles in the context of the post-pandemic crisis”), funded by the
National Science Centre, grant no.: UMO-2020/37/B/HS6/00479. The authors wish to thank editors and
anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments on earlier drafts of the article.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0142-5455.htm
Received 27 June 2022
Revised 26 January 2023
28 April 2023
Accepted 1 May 2023
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 45 No. 7, 2023
pp. 62-78
Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-06-2022-0289
(Ebbinghaus and Weishaupt, 2022a;Meardi and Tassinari, 2022;Topli
sek et al., 2022).
Simultaneously, there are counterarguments that the pandemic emergency served as a
booster for a renewed social partnership, even in the countries in which it had eroded in pre-
pandemic periods (Brandl, 2023). Strikingly, the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis for the
industrial relations are relatively rarely discussed in international literature, and the analysis
on the development of social dialogue during pandemic in Central and Eastern European
countries remains even more scarce and policy-focused (Brandl, 2023;Gardawski and
Towalski, 2020;Luk
a
cov
aet al., 2022;Surdykowska, 2021).
In this context, referring to theoretical debates on diversity of Central and Eastern
European capitalism(s) and industrial relations (Gardawski and Meardi, 2010;Rapacki, 2019)
and the political, institutional and economic conditions for social dialogue (Traxler, 2010), the
article aims at exploring the developments of social dialogue in Poland following the outbreak
of the pandemic. The main research question is whether the crisis has helped to revitalise
social dialogue or has it further revealed its weaknesses that were apparent before it. Based
on the analysis of expert interviews with the representatives of trade unions, employer
organisations and ministries involved in tripartite social dialogue, we formulate a thesis that
Covid-19 has not been a disruptive change that would overturn institutional foundations of
industrial relations in Poland. Instead, just like in the case of the previous crises, it amplified
the phenomena that had been already present before, namely serious imbalance of power
within the tripartite relations among the state, the employers and the trade unions. It also
encouraged voluntaristic tendencies of the government, with public policymaking
disregarding social concertation.
The article revisits the familiar ground of tripartite social dialogue in times of crisis and
adds new arguments to the ongoing debates on the path-dependent development of social
partners’and governments’responses to the pandemic-driver economic downturn (Avdagic
et al., 2011;Brandl, 2023;Ebbinghaus and Weishaupt, 2022b;Meardi and Tassinari, 2022).
It does so by focusing on the case of Poland which has been earlier described in terms of
“illusory corporatism”characterised by “façade negotiations”aimed at winning “the
complicity of labour for neoliberal transformation”(Ost, 2011, p. 20) or “PR-corporatism”
designed to demonstrate government’s“adherence to the consensual mode of policy-making”
(Bernaciak, 2013, p. 239). The analysis suggests that the pandemic led to reinforcement of
“illusory corporatism”in Poland, deepened mistrust among social partners and enhanced
informal channels of influencing policymaking. The unprecedented health care crisis served
as an additional excuse not to involve social partners in consensual policymaking. While
some improvements of social dialogue were noticed in 2021 (Surdykowska, 2021), the
pandemics made the further erosion of the tripartism in Poland possible and, unlike during
the 2008þcrisis, did not boost even a short-lived “crisis corporatism”in fear of economic
shocks (Czarzasty and Mrozowicki, 2022). In that context, business interests were better
represented than those of labour, and rather limited, pro-worker policies were achieved not
due to tripartite negotiations, but as a result of trade union organising and mobilisation or –
more often –thanks to unilateral decisions of right-wing government striving to sustain
popular support for its policies by workers. The reproduction of “illusory corporatism”is
interpreted in the light of existing theoretical literature on the conditions of successful social
dialogue (Baccaro and Lim, 2007;Guardiancich and Molina, 2022;Perez-Diaz, 1986) as the
result of durable power imbalance in relations of the state, employer organisations and trade
unions, the institutional deficiencies of the social dialogue institutions and the “window-
dressing”, and PR-oriented approach to social dialogue by the government.
The remainder of the article is organised as follows: first, we provide an overview of the
literature, empirical accounts and theoretical concepts regarding the role of social dialogue,
especially tripartite institutions, in dealing with socio-economic crises. Next, a methodological
note is presented and, subsequently, we deliver an analysis of the 22 expert interviews with
Pandemic and
social dialogue
in Poland
63
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