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ABSTRACTThis article introduces the Special Issue on Eastern Europe in the COVID-19 crisis. It seeks to shed light on the different and partly worse experiences in East Central Europe compared to those of the West by analysing the crisis, its governance, and effects in the region from the vantage point of specific vulnerabilities, which have been building up for years. We identify four major vulnerabilities – a severe crisis of care, strains in social solidarity, democratic erosion and dependent capitalism – which have contributed to the East having experienced high infection and death rates, major economic crises, and pandemic power grabs.

ABSTRACTThe extraordinary context of the COVID-19 crisis gave governments around the world a freer hand to reshape their socio-economic orders. Political economists studying East Central Europe have started a debate in how far democratic backsliding in the region has ushered in a more authoritarian form of capitalism. Our paper examines responses to COVID-19 of four anti-liberal governments in the region: Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Slovenia. Incorporating multiple case studies, it assesses the degree to which growing centralisation of political power has entrenched different mechanisms of authoritarian capitalism, as well as the limits to their use in different national contexts.

The article makes four main arguments. First, that collective bargaining has the capacity to mitigate the negative externalities arising from market volatility, and the process of marketization, by establishing arrangements which provide substantive and procedural certainty for both workers and employers, and in particular greater security for workers. Secondly, that multi-employer bargaining arrangements are better equipped to fulfil this function than single-employer ones. Thirdly, that there are institutional differences amongst multi-employer bargaining arrangements concerning governance of bargaining at the company level which considerably influence their capacity to promote certainty and security. Fourthly, that under the pressures brought about by the crisis, the marketization of multi-employer collective bargaining is being accelerated either by the parties themselves or, more disruptively, by intervention from governments under pressure from international and European institutions, with potentially damaging consequences for the ability to address negative externalities.

An advocacy coalition of trade unions, churches and NGOs had been trying for a long time to mobilise domestic media and politicians in order to re-regulate the German meat industry. The meat industry’s low-cost business model, using employee posting and subcontracting on a massive scale, has led to extreme forms of unsafe working and poor living conditions for large numbers of Central and Eastern European workers. But it is only in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that the German government decided to ban subcontracting, posting and temporary work in this industry. Why did COVID-19 make a difference? In an industry in which the livelihoods of local communities in Germany’s pig belt and in deprived rural parts of Romania have become structurally dependent on subcontracting, institutional change would not have happened without the pre-existing mobilisation of the above-mentioned advocacy coalition. But COVID-19 created a ‘perfect storm’ that empowered this coalition by helping reframe the meat industry issue away from a ‘narrow’ employment regulation problem into a ‘broader’ public health threat. Indeed, after becoming a virus hotspot, the meat industry was no longer just a threat to the livelihoods of its own workers, but to those of the wider local community.