https://doi.org/10.31261/GSS_SN.2025.16.04
Collective disputes are dynamic processes in which the bargaining power of the parties to the conflict—employers and trade unions—shifts continuously over time. This analysis starts from the assumption that Polish trade unions have structurally limited institutional bargaining power, resulting from the current legal regulations governing collective bargaining procedures and the right to strike. This article conceptualises bargaining power as a short-term variable, susceptible to fluctuations even at individual stages of the conflict. The analysis is based on qualitative research involving interviews with trade union leaders who headed collective disputes between 2019 and 2022. The findings indicate that employers systematically use, among other instruments, legal procedures, repression of union activists, and the juridification of conflict to curtail employees’ bargaining power. In response, trade unions resort to compensatory strategies such as employee mobilisation, externalisation of the conflict, building social coalitions, and using informal forms of pressure. The results show that the course of a collective dispute should be analysed as a relational sequence of mutual interactions, in which losses in one area of bargaining power can be partially offset by activating other sources of bargaining power. Understanding this dynamic is key to analysing contemporary labour conflicts and the functioning of collective industrial relations in Poland.
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