Ten years of trade union co-operation
Ten years of trade union co-operation

Summary/Abstract: After the political and economic changes around the end of the 80s and at the beginning of the 90s, the Hungarian trade union movement finally experienced in 2000 something which could claim to be unprecedented. On May 1, the international day of labour, the six confederations were, for the first time, together in huge numbers in Budapest City Park where their predecessors had demonstrated – similarly to any other place around the world – for the eight hour working day in 1890. One hundred years later, the Hungarian trade unions see much more than workers’ rights being threatened by the questionable re-drafting of the Labour Code by the Christian-conservative-bourgeois coalition. This has led the confederations which, for a decade, ‘were not able to show the generosity that could help them tolerate the differences, to come much closer to one another. The media and the general public also reacted positively as if they had only been waiting for the oft-competing confederations at last to stop their fighting of each other and to communicate with one voice the expectations and requirements of trade unions to a government not exactly benevolent in its views.

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