Analysing employment practices in Western European multinationals: coordination, industrial relations and employment flexibility in Poland

Despite the fact that multinational companies (MNCs) in Central Eastern Europe significantly contribute to employment growth in the region, qualitative knowledge about diffusion of employment practices in this region, and about coordination of MNCs with local labour market actors and institutions is still limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by underlining the coordination between MNCs, local actors, and international actors in shaping employment practices, their diffusion from headquarters to the workplace level, and their adaptation to local conditions in Poland. The goal is to explain MNC-driven adjustment to local conditions in employment practices of production workers and industrial relations through which this goal can be achieved. To explain this, we apply several coordination games between management and trade unions in the empirical part of the paper.

We argue that the MNC’s corporate intention to utilise local conditions, the interactive coordination of the factory management with the local trade union, and an underdeveloped international coordination of trade unions within the MNC are the main factors explaining the specific local employment practices and industrial relations instead of their diffusion from MNC headquarters or other subsidiaries.