Is Central and Eastern Europe a Laboratory for New Forms of Employment Relations?

French Ministry of Labour-funded research on the location of French firms in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia aimed to answer a question that is both simple and wide-ranging: when large French industrial companies establish subsidiaries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) do they export their employment relations (Delteil et al., 2009)?1 Looking at the main results of the research gives a clear answer: employment relations in the subsidiaries in CEE appear far weaker than those in France among the industrial firms concerned. At first glance, this situation is rooted in the internationalization strategies implemented by the latter. Indeed, the economic strategies pursued by French firms in Eastern Europe are based on financial optimization, involving competition between geographic regions, divisions and local sites and a deterioration of industrial relations, especially in terms of collective bargaining agreements.2 The relations between parent companies and their CEE subsidiaries are direct, while industrial relations within the subsidiaries are often based on highly local criteria that are far removed from the collective agreement guarantees usually found at French sites. The regulatory role that some bodies could play, involving international companies within the European Union, is often ineffective.