Die soziale Macht der Gewerkschaften in Kroatien

In this dissertation, the different sources of workers power differentiated between by E.O.Wright, Beverly Silver and Klaus Dörre are used to look at trade unions in Croatia. Their organizational power is to a high degree concentrated on the public sector, on older workers and on employees with perpetual contracts, so it is very easy to depict them as mere lobby organisations of the employees in the public services. Their market power is weakened by the constantly high unemployment, precarious employment and a fragmented labour market. Their production power has declined because of the deindustrialization of the 1990ies and is concentrated on a few companies of strategical importance. The Croatian state has not been interested in an institutional integration of the trade unions from the beginning. In the few fields with a potentially high union power the unions weaken themselves by fragmentation. Cooperation with social movements has only insufficiently worked so far. All of this is part of answering the question why Trade unions have not represented a social and political countervailing power in Croatia so far.