Croatia: workers save their companies through strikes and protests
Croatia: workers save their companies through strikes and protests

Summary/Abstract: Channels of communication between the Croatian social partners – trade unions, employers and the Government – have never been in a poorer shape. Analysts of Croatian social reality agree more and more on this statement, and there are sufficient reasons to support it. There is an increasing number of examples of the Government declaring its acceptance of social dialogue as a civilised heritage whereas, in reality, through its acts or the statements of its top officials, it is actually ignoring and underestimating the importance of trade unions. Employers do not even want to declare their membership of their official representative organisation – the HUP/Croatian Employers Association – in public; they have put collective bargaining on hold and they do not want to initiate new negotiations on expired collective agreements. Fragmented and segmented trade unions, additionally weakened by leadership struggles, manage to articulate almost no essential workers’ demand or to fight for it consistently, either through negotiation or the classical instruments of workers’ struggle. Such a contested social environment makes for social and, particularly, industrial conflicts. In this context the author describes situation and strategy of the Croatian trade unions in various fields of industrial conflicts.

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