MartaKahancovaacute;.doc

Marta Kahancová PhD. Student, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam Visiting PhD student, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne Embedded Coordination: Multinationals’ Employment Practices and Workplace Industrial Relations in Western and Eastern Europe Paper for the Graduate Retreat of the Society for Comparative Research Yale University, May 6-7, 2006 Abstract Evidence from four factories of a Dutch multinational company (MNC) in Belgium, France, Poland and Hungary shows a remarkable variation in production workers’ employment practices. These practices were not diffused from the company’s headquarters, but developed locally, benefiting from differing local labor market conditions in Western and Eastern Europe, and different forms of coordination with local trade unions. This paper explains how workplace management-union coordination in the MNC facilitated the involvement of trade unions in the development and deployment of specific employment practices. The legal framework and economic considerations represent the benchmark for union involvement, but do not explain why in some factories industrial relations are more cooperative and the union involvement is higher than in other factories. I argue that the actual union involvement is the function of actors’ social interaction and embedded coordination. Via embedded coordination workplace industrial relations become central in workplace employment flexibility: they directly influence the factories’ performance and ability of global competitiveness and local responsiveness. In the times of increasing competition on production markets every multinational firm (MNC) attempts to increase the performance of its subsidiaries. Often this performance is extensively shaped by existing employment flexibility practices that allow each factory an optimal response to market demands. In the process of developing and deploying employment f