The Emasculation of Trade Unions and Workers’ Drift to Neonationalism in Hungary

Abstract

Theoretically, the essay is built on Karl Polanyi’s interpretation of disembedding and Chris Hann’s application of this model to post-1989 Eastern Europe. The essay sets out to explain why trade unions failed to become a successful countermovement in the Polanyian sense of the word by analysing four sources of power available to unions. We go on to analyse the social and political consequences of this failure, demonstrating through the analysis of life-history interviews how ‘lonely fighters’ can become rightwing voters and activists, thanks to the rise of a new political culture on the shopfloor.

According to Marxist–Leninist ideology, ‘actually existing’ socialism was based on the rule—or at least the social support—of the working class.¹ Although this ideology was discredited with the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, workers continued to be perceived as the emblematic class of socialism by many observers. In some countries their electoral behaviour supported this ideological construct inherited from the communist past. For example, working-class votes helped to return leftwing political parties to power in countries such as Hungary and Poland in the early 1990s (Angelusz & Tardos 1994; Pickles & Smith 1998; Tóth & Grajczjár 2007; Ignácz & Szabó 2014).

This trend was discontinued in the new millennium. In an influential book, Ost (2005) argued that the rightwing, nationalist Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość—PiS) mobilised Polish working-class voters by exploiting their anger and frustration with the neoliberal order. Workers across the region have combined ‘catch-up’ aspirations to create a Western-type consumer society with the conviction that rightwing political parties critical of the neoliberal order offered the best hope for could restoring full employment and social security.

Following the lead of Pittaway (2005), Bartha (2013) demonstrated through a comparative study of labour under state socialism in Eastern Germany and Hungary that these ‘welfare dictatorships’ had generated consumer needs that not even reformed economies such as Hungarian (following the reform of 1968) could satisfy.² Advanced Western countries such as West Germany and Austria became a yardstick for what a ‘capitalist’ country could do for workers. What Michael Burawoy experienced in a Hungarian factory in the second half of the 1980s is instructive. His co-workers persistently asked him how much money a worker earned in the United States, while failing to recognise socialist achievements such as free health care or free education (Burawoy & Lukács 1992, p. 15). The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was bound to remain unattractive in a world in which Western commodities were symbols of status and valued more highly than community life or free education. Hence the remarkable lack of resistance on the part of workers to the restoration of capitalism.

Workers’ expectations of a Western-style capitalist welfare society received ideological support from intellectuals who substituted Marxist–Leninist doctrines with Western liberal ideologies. Market economy, embourgeoisement and civil society became the new catchwords, and liberalism was upheld with almost as much dogmatism as the Marxist–Leninist ideology of the buried communist past. Liberal intellectuals held private property to be the guarantee that ‘communism’ would never return (Kornai 1993; Csaba 1995). They undermined modest leftwing attempts to promote employee ownership of factories and businesses, let alone working-class self-regulation and communal ownership.³ Such initiatives received little support from workers, for whom well-stocked supermarkets were evidence of a ‘good’ capitalism.

By the new millennium, all forms of working-class self-regulation had been removed from the political agenda.⁴ Ost (2005) predicted that the workers would punish liberal intellectuals by voting for parties that promised national protection against the abuses of global capitalism. The Polish parliamentary elections of 2005 indeed brought a sweeping victory for PiS, which turned out to be a harbinger of populist electoral victories throughout the world in the following years.

The purpose of this essay is twofold. Firstly, the essay examines, through the Hungarian case study, why unionism failed to gain momentum in Eastern Europe after 1989; secondly, it introduces some of the results of our interview project conducted in two Hungarian factories in the car manufacturing sector in two towns, which are now strongholds of Fidesz, Hungary’s rightwing ruling political party. Since 2010, Fidesz has built a regime described by its Viktor Orbán as ‘illiberal’.⁵

By investigating the weakness of the unions, we seek to show how the political left lost the support of working people and thereby explain the lasting popularity of illiberal political forces in the new century. While Kideckel (2002) wrote of the unmaking of the working class in post-socialist conditions, Kalb and Halmai (2011) refined this account by arguing that workers were not motivated solely by individual materialist calculation or by the urge to avenge the traumas of ‘transition’. Rather, they were looking for new forms of integration, which they found in communities diametrically opposed to the discredited institutions of the new liberal order. In Poland, activist energies that had formerly been channelled to Solidarity and leftwing demands were now redirected to support the rightwing populism of PiS (Kalb 2009). The same author argued a decade later that the ‘illiberal revolution’ was best seen as the popular and populist counterpunch, in which the ‘orientalized’ losers of the transition expressed their ‘resentment’ towards the ‘colonizing’ West (Kalb 2019, p. 213).⁶

Our fieldwork amongst skilled and unskilled workers and trade union activists and leaders in the car industry between 2018 and 2020 has shown that it was not only the out-and-out losers of regime change who gravitated to populism. Workers employed by major international companies who were better paid and enjoyed higher levels of job and material security than workers in the domestic industry also shifted toward populist positions. To explain these developments, the essay follows Hann (2019) in reaching back to the theoretical framework of Polanyi (1944). For Polanyi, trade unions were an important instrument in society’s struggle to protect itself from the ravages of a ‘disembedded’ market economy. Another possible form of countermovement, however, was fascism, understood as a movement to ‘bring economy and polity back together in a new, antidemocratic amalgam’ (Hann 2019, p. 11).

Hann applies this model of disembedding to Eastern Europe, which became a laboratory for neoliberal experimentation after 1989–1990.⁷ Communities, factories and collective farms all disintegrated, while new, nationalistic identities have been promulgated with the ostensible aim of protecting society from the ills of globalisation and reckless marketisation. Our argument is that the political left in Hungary was complicit in this realignment by gradually withdrawing from the representation of working people. The vacuum left by this withdrawal was successfully filled by the right, notably by Orbán’s Fidesz.

It must be borne in mind that most working-class communities in Hungary suffered greatly in the 1990s. Bartha (2011a) has demonstrated that these years were remembered as ‘narratives of decline’, not only of flagship socialist enterprises but of concomitant networks of reciprocity, collegiality and personal friendship. This was the case even in towns which managed to attract transnational investment. In centres of formerly prestigious heavy industries such as Miskolc and Ózd, the destruction of working-class communities was catastrophic (Szombati 2018; Alabán 2020). The ensuing creation of social ghettoes set the ethnically Hungarian population against the Roma poor, who, after being the first to be laid off, were then stigmatised as ‘lazy’ and ‘welfare-dependent’ (Szombati 2018, and this issue).

The present essay supplements existing knowledge of the demise of the organised labour movement in Hungary by drawing on the results of recent fieldwork with workers who, on the face of it, have prospered in the last decade, at least in comparison with the more exploited workers of Hungarian-owned industries, especially in small and medium-size firms, where the organisation of trade unions has often been informally discouraged (see also Szalai 2004). In the car manufacturing sector, where we mainly find German-owned firms, trade unions are accepted as legitimate social partners and bargaining agents on behalf of employees. Since the issue of salaries is confidential information, we can only say that workers earn 30% more on overage in this sector in the two examined companies than workers in the domestic industry.⁸ We thereby widen the framework for understanding working-class neonationalism beyond the familiar ‘rustbelt’ model.

The essay is structured as follows. In the first part the essay explains why trade unions failed to become a successful countermovement in the Polanyian sense by analysing four potential sources of power available to them. In the second part, it presents the results of our interview project conducted in German-owned car manufacturing plants in Győr and in Kecskemét, between 2018 and 2020. Here, the essay demonstrates through the analysis of life-history interviews how our interview partners, who can be deemed as ‘elite’ workers in comparison with workers of small and medium-size, mostly Hungarian-owned companies, can morph into rightwing voters and activists, thanks to the rise of a new political culture on the shopfloor.

Trade unions as a Polanyian countermovement

For Polanyi (1944) the social history of our age, from the eighteenth century, was a history of struggle between laissez-faire ideology (liberalism) and protective countermovements such as trade unions. Countermovement emerges in a great variety of forms. Unions are listed by Polanyi among the forces of countermovement (Polanyi 1944, p. 151). Polanyi draws a distinction between British and continental European trade unions. While British workers relied on the power of trade unions to improve their position in the market for their labour power, their continental European counterparts sought to influence legislation through socialist parties (Polanyi 1944, pp. 183–87). However, Polanyi did not pay much attention to the conditions under which unions could become an effective countermovement.

The industrial relations literature has identified a range of variables to measure the power of unions. They include political clout or embeddedness (Valenzuela 1991), organisational efficiency (Behrens et al. 2004) and discursive power (Schmalz et al. 2018), in addition to quantifiable indicators such as membership and collective bargaining coverage.

This essay proposes a different understanding of sources of union power, influenced by the fact that unions are historically shaped, path-dependent institutions. This means that the power resources of unions have been formed across their historical trajectory. It is possible to identify four major sources of union power, reflecting distinct stages of unions’ historical trajectory.

The first is their institutional capacity to represent a cartel of employees in order to limit competition in the labour market among workers and, at the same time, limit management prerogatives so as to ensure stability and fair wages and working conditions for union members. This power source originates in the craft union stage, the predominant form of union organisation in the early nineteenth century.

The second is the provision of various services for members as an organisation, both at their workplaces and in their lives outside work in cases of hardship.⁹ This power source was also present in the craft union stage and developed further in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The third source of power is to act as the ‘sword of justice’ (Flanders 1961) in wider societal issues important for union members and workers (employees or citizens), thereby stimulating emotional and political loyalty towards union goals and organisations beyond the expectation of material benefits and other concrete union services. This power source is the bridge between immediate work-related concerns and wider social and political issues. It opens a space for unions to engage in politics at large, beyond the narrow arena of industrial relations (Piven 2008). This power source is illustrated by the rise of social-democratic industrial unionism in the late nineteenth century, especially in continental Europe.

The final power source is the willingness of political parties to integrate unions into the national institutional and political system, granting them political voice and statutory rights, while urging and even requiring firms to reach an accommodation with their unions. This power source was consolidated in various Western countries in the second half of the twentieth century.

We shall now analyse the changing capacity of Hungarian unions along these four axes and in their interrelations. Our goal is to explain why unions were not able to become the representative voice of employees, and why the willingness of political actors to integrate unions into the political decision-making process has evaporated since 1989.

Representing a cartel of employees

The organising principle of the overwhelming majority of Hungarian unions is the one company–one union model. This is a legacy of Stalinist reorganisation, which transformed the craft- and skill-based social-democratic unions into company unions in order to destroy the autonomy of social-democratic workers (Jakab 1985; Pető & Szakács 1988; Czakó & Sipos 1990).¹⁰ The role of company unions was greatly enhanced in the wake of the partial decentralisation and partial liberalisation implemented by the Kádár regime in the late 1960s.¹¹ Company-level collective agreements were re-institutionalised to regulate conditions of employment. They provided a mechanism for diverging from the detailed regulation of the Labour Code. Consequently, local union regulation efforts focused on setting up company-specific internal labour markets through the establishment of ‘exceptions’ from the national standard. Thus, collective agreements did not set fixed wage categories and strict conditions across companies, but rather functioned to regulate wage increases at company level and to set some loose minimum and maximum limits for fringe benefits. It was left to management to allocate remuneration within the broad limits defined by the collective agreement. The framework character of these agreements meant that unions never attempted to unify terms and conditions of employment but only to establish ‘exemptions’ and to tailor terms to special, company-specific needs. This practice, leaving management enormous discretion within wide boundaries, survived the system change. Setting individual wages, for example, is accepted by many trade unionists as an unquestionable management prerogative. This culture is not conducive to cartelisation efforts by unions to limit competition among employees and curtail management prerogatives.

After 1989, only a few trade unions succeeded in consolidating themselves as traditional skill-based unions. Well-known examples are the union of engine drivers of the state-owned National Railway Company (Mozdonyvezetők Szakszervezete) and the union of the civil aviation controllers (Control Magyar Légiforgalmi Irányítók Szakszervezete). Each of these organised a few hundred employees and concentrated its activities on improving the conditions of its members.

After the end of socialism, unions faced increasing challenges in the environment, which was not conducive to the revival of the labour movement (Héthy 1994; Tóth 2002a; Girndt 2013). A further problem was the fierce competition for the representation of labour interests between the newly formed pro-democratic parties and the National Council of Trade Unions (Szakszervezetek Országos Tanácsa—SZOT), the socialist national trade union confederation, which counted four million members under state socialism, when union membership was de facto compulsory (Tóth 2000). The socialist state employed more than 3,000 trade union functionaries (Tölgyessy 1988). As democratisation proceeded, critical voices increased within SZOT, which renamed itself the National Alliance of Hungarian Trade Unions (Magyar Szakszervezetek Országos Szövetsége—MSZOSZ) in March 1990. With this move, the centrally administered bureaucratic system of the former SZOT also ceased to function. However, many mid-level SZOT functionaries opted to declare their union ‘independent’ rather than joining MSZOSZ. As a consequence, the former SZOT fragmented into four successor confederations, among which MSZOSZ was the largest (Tóth 2000, pp. 161–62).

Alongside the reform and fragmentation of the socialist union organisation, new pro-democratic grassroots unions were established. Liga (Független Szakszervezetek Demokratikus Ligája) was formed in 1988 under the aegis of liberal intellectuals, and the National Movement of Workers’ Councils (Munkástanácsok Országos Szövetsége) in 1990. Liga was formed as a liberal union, while leftwing intellectuals hoped that workers councils would continue the tradition of the councils of 1956 (Lomax 1990). However, both newly formed unions remained weak (Szalai 1994). The successor confederations of SZOT continued to dominate the organised labour movement, with a share of 90–95% among trade union members (Tóth 2000, p. 163).

The socialist-era legacy trade unions, the successor confederations of SZOT, inherited the immense wealth of SZOT. Liga and the Workers Council Movement argued that this inherited wealth explained why the former communist elite remained at the helm of the legacy unions. The parliament passed a law in the autumn of 1991 concerning the inherited wealth of legacy unions. It obliged legacy unions to subject their inherited wealth to a redistribution based on the result of the election of union representatives into the social security boards.¹²

While this bitter struggle between pro-democratic and socialist-era legacy unions was going on at the national level, the entire state socialist industrial structure was falling apart. Within a few years, most enterprises either ceased to exist or were broken up into smaller units and privatised. Restructuring was accompanied by massive layoffs. About 1.8 million jobs were lost and unemployment jumped to almost 14% (Pittaway 2011; Ferge 2012; Farkas 2019). Unemployment remained stubbornly high until the mid-2010s. Industrial restructuring thus led rapidly to the practical elimination of most workplace-based unions. Only a handful of major companies and their unions managed to avoid this fate, including Tungsram and the steelworks in Dunaújváros.

The collapse of membership and fee revenues drastically reduced the number of full-time union employees. Central staff were made redundant precisely when officials at lower levels and ordinary employees were most in need of professional aid, in particular, legal advice.

The ability of workplace unions to form a cartel of employees is limited legally. Ruling 8/1990 (VI. 12.) of the Constitution Court eliminated those sections of the socialist Labour Code that had codified the cartel-style practices of prewar social-democratic craft unions.¹³ This ruling was premised on the assumption that the socialist unions formed part of management, and that it was necessary to restore employees’ individual freedom to form their legitimate representative institutions (Kollonay & Ladó 1996). The post-socialist Labour Code, enacted in 1992 and following the spirit of the Constitutional Court, sought to re-establish employer–worker contractual freedom, in which unions, instead of being collectively empowered agents of workers, could only advise their members. The Labour Code also adjusted union rights to the perceived need and conditions of the market economy by limiting statutory rights and unions’ ability to constrain management prerogatives.

The cultural tradition of unions, inherited from the socialist past, also constrained the ability of post-socialist unions to act as a cartel of employees. In the socialist system, unions did indeed act as a human resource agency on behalf of the management, charged with reconciling employee concerns with the priority of meeting management targets. Representational practices were characterised by bureaucratic coordination and informal problem-solving, but open conflict with management was almost unthinkable (Héthy & Makó 1978).

The cultural traditions of workers also inhibited cartelisation. The socialist flexibilisation of employment after 1968 promoted individualised or small group-based negotiating strategies (Héthy & Makó 1978; Kertesi & Sziráczky 1989). Long after the end of compulsory socialist unionism, workers found it hard to break the habit of seeking solutions to problems individually or at the level of very small groups (Szalai 2004; Tóth 2013). It should be noted here that, compared to the socialist era, the techniques of human resource management had undergone a revolution that further facilitated individualisation. Modern technologies and management techniques have reduced the ability of unions everywhere to operate collectively.

The upshot of this discussion is that the capacity of unions to form a cartel and to limit employers’ prerogatives in post-socialist Hungary depended to a great extent on local conditions and on the personal abilities and objectives of leading union activists and their managerial counterparts. What we have termed the ‘institutional power source’ is not facilitated by the law, the evolved culture of the unions, or the workers themselves.

Providing services to members as a business organisation

Hungarian unions during the socialist era excelled in running and redistributing company welfare services, including childcare, access to holiday resorts and numerous workplace-related welfare benefits. Unions, as part of the apparatus of management, acted like the enterprise’s human resource agency by taking responsibility for resolving workers’ complaints, while maintaining a cordial relationship with management. The primary purpose of collective bargaining was not so much to protect employees from management arbitrariness as to negotiate good working conditions and enable the enterprise to meet its production goals in the interests of everyone (Héthy & Makó 1978).

The socialist regime, in the spirit of the pre-socialist craft union tradition, granted unions the right to adjudicate individual conflicts through company-based arbitration committees. These committees were the first statutory forum for adjudication before labour court procedures. However, given that union bureaucracy was embedded in that of management, unions tended to play this role in a neutral manner rather than representing employees against management (Héthy & Csuhaj 1989; Tóth 2013). The 1992 Labour Code ended the adjudication of work-related conflicts at the workplace level. Henceforth all conflict related to alleged breaches of the law had to be brought to labour courts. This made it impossible for unions to intervene in dispute settlement. Their role was reduced to that of an informal mediator or voluntary legal adviser to those who requested the unions’ advice, whether or not they were members.

The system change deprived union leaders of their privileged position within the management team, which they had previously enjoyed as part of the nomenklatura under the socialist regime. Generally, post-1989 management has seen unions as an unnecessary burden or even as troublemakers and the enemy, impeding efficient production and infringing on management prerogatives. A good example of this was the blocking of unionisation initiatives by Suzuki (Tóth 2002b). A union might continue to play its intermediary role where management was paternalistic or a union leader had a good personal relationship with the top managers.

In the course of industrial restructuring and changes of ownership, the privileged position of unions in the redistribution of company welfare benefits was also eradicated (Héthy 1994). The trend of weakening the role of the unions was reinforced by the 1992 Labour Code, which created the statutory institution of works councils. The institution of works councils was modelled following the German Betriebsrat, but without granting them powerful co-determination rights. The Hungarian works council is a consultation and information body. Nonetheless, the Labour Code transferred the former statutory rights of unions concerning company welfare issues to the newly created works councils. This weakened the statutory positions of unions at the workplace level. Since 1989 unions have typically redistributed some of their membership revenues to members in the form of Christmas packages and provide support for the school-age children of their members by contributing to their expenses. Some unions run shopping card discount schemes with local shops. Such services are appreciated, but their impact is limited. Works councils also replaced unions as a re-distributor agency of company welfare funds, which further weakened the role of unions in the life of employees (Tóth 1997).

Due to these changes, the power of unions at the workplace level depended more than ever before on their ability to attract support from their members. But union membership collapsed after 1989, when it was no longer compulsory. Unions lost their earlier role as part of the human resource management of socialist companies. Management rather see unions as an inconvenient organisation, and workers therefore often express fear and complain about intimidation by management. As a consequence of this, workplace unions are rare and weak. Most local unions are relatively small organisations with membership rarely above a few hundred (Girndt 2013; Tóth 2013). This is not enough to support a full-time union convener. Activists who themselves work as full-time employees lack the time and legal knowledge to act effectively. Instead, they rely on informal problem-solving based on personal ties to management and, as a result, few enterprises bother to codify local collective agreements.

Acting as the ‘sword of justice’

The collapse of state socialism discredited the socialist vision of a non-capitalist society. As a result, no Hungarian unions called themselves socialist after 1989. Some leaders still harbour leftwing ideas inspired by democratic socialism but it is difficult for them to offer an ideological vision. Unions therefore tend to steer clear of such terrain and confine themselves instead to concrete interest representation issues, such as maintaining the services of the welfare state and extending the statutory rights of unions and workers at the workplace level.

In Hungary, where state redistribution is enormously important and the tax burden is among the highest in Europe, unions have to show restraint and refrain from making ‘demagogic’ demands, which even their staunch political allies would be unable to fulfil in government due to the constraints of the European Stability Pact. The Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt—MSZP) won two parliamentary elections with promises to extend the welfare state in alliance with leftwing trade unions, but these programmes could not be implemented. The fact that, in both cases, leftwing unions only staged lukewarm protests, was damaging to their reputation. The fiasco of the ‘Bokros Package’, a broad austerity programme introduced by the left–liberal coalition in 1995 following the ‘Tequila crisis’,¹⁴ ended the prospect of the development of a social democratic-style, neocorporatist welfare state (Tóth 2002a).

As a consequence, unions protest power had evaporated. In 1992, it was still possible for the trade union movement to credibly threaten the government with a national strike and force it to negotiate a compromise. In 2019, when the Orbán government introduced extreme flexibilisation of overtime under the terms of Act CXVI (dubbed by unions as the ‘slave law’),¹⁵ union protest was small and ineffective and they were unable to organise a national strike.¹⁶

Integrating unions into national politics

In the 1990s the newly established Hungarian political parties were generally suspicious of trade unions, fearing that even the reformed ‘successor organisations’ were saturated in anti-democratic sentiments and likely to collude with discredited socialist cadres to undermine the new order (Héthy 1994; Tóth 2013). The first post-socialist government was torn between recognising the role of unions in an institutional configuration that would conform to European Union standards and its desire to break the power of a union movement contaminated by its integration into the former regime. The upshot was a series of measures which aspired to an idealised European social model but, in reality, undermined unions’ claim to represent workers.

In the parliamentary elections of 1998, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party campaigned with the promise that it would break with the neocorporatist socialist model, which was now widely associated with the aforementioned Bokros package. Orbán’s first government extended the rights of works councils at the company level, while reducing the role of tripartite bodies at the national level. These measures were designed to weaken union power at the company level, and at the same time weaken the voice of unions in national issues. These anti-union measures led MSZOSZ, the major left-leaning union, to give its backing to MSZP, helping to ensure the latter’s victory in the 2002 elections. The new government introduced measures to extend the welfare state and re-institutionalised national level tripartite negotiations. The 2006 election resulted in a comfortable victory for the left. However, as after the 1994 victory, the re-elected government was obliged to introduce a stabilisation package and thereby contract the welfare state services it had promised to expand. This policy shift poisoned the relationship between MSZP and the left-leaning unions. The privatisation and liberalisation of health insurance was the final straw, which Fidesz exploited to prove that the government had failed to represent the interests of citizens. While the leftwing unions resorted to muted protests, their right-leaning rivals, Liga and the Workers’ Council Movement, were active in organising protests and developed a close relationship with Fidesz. Re-elected in 2010, Fidesz continued to weaken the institutional positions of unions. An amendment to the Strike Law rendered it practically impossible to organise a strike in the public utility sector and the 2012 Labour Code heavily curtailed the unions’ statutory rights (Girndt 2013; Neumann 2018).

In 1992, Hungarian trade unions had 2.7 million fee-paying members; by 1997 this number fell to 840,000, and by 2018, to 300,000 (Szabó 2019). This relatively low membership is distributed across four major national confederations that are bitter rivals. Given the weakness of national and sectoral levels, workplace-level unions are the backbone of union organisation in Hungary. However, few local unions are able to organise even half of the workers at their workplace and they lack the resources to fund full-time union officials (Tóth 2013; Neumann 2018).

In sum, by the 2010s unions no longer had any powerful political allies to integrate them into the national political system. Following accession to the EU, there was not even the need to keep up appearances as prescribed in the European social model. Unions have been by and large abandoned by political parties; with all party-political alliances poisoned, they have to rely on their own meagre resources to make their voice heard.

Working-class activism and the attraction of neonationalism

The success of Orbán’s illiberal regime in Hungary (Fidesz won a two-thirds majority in three successive parliamentary elections) increased researchers’ interest in the causes of this persistence. Kalb and Halmai (2011) and Feischmidt et al. (2014) conceptualised neonationalism as a response to neoliberalism and globalisation. Neonationalism’s culturally essentialist form of ‘us’ is positioned in the centre and contrasted against two groups of ‘them’: internationalised power-holders ‘above us’ and lower-status socioeconomic, cultural and ethnic minorities ‘below us’ (Gingrich & Banks 2006). There is also a distinction between the ‘deserving’, hard-working ‘us’ and the ‘non-deserving’, excluded group of ‘them’, such as marginalised ethnic groups and migrants. In a 2018 article, Hann set out to demonstrate ‘how the persistence of a crucial value pertaining to the sphere of the economy integrates the value sphere of provincial Hungarians’ (Hann 2018, p. 231), using the example of a Hungarian village, Tázlár, and a nearby town, Kiskunhalas. Hann’s starting point was the concept of moral economy, which had been, in the perception of the ‘decent’ villagers, violated twice over: firstly, by the neoliberal order, which devalued their skills; secondly, by the undeserving, excluded group of ‘welfare-seeker’ and ‘lazy’ Roma people, who were deemed ‘culturally inferior’.¹⁷ The concept of ‘deservingness’ has also been taken up by Kalb, who spoke of hierarchical desire emerging ‘from below’ (Kalb 2019, p. 213) and ‘angry white labour’ in the provinces (Kalb 2019, p. 208). In what follows, we will elaborate on these concepts, drawing on anthropological material (life-history interviews) that we collected in Győr and Kecskemét between 2018 and 2020.

Győr is an old industrial town, which had a considerable working-class population even before socialist industrialisation. After 1989, the town succeeded in attracting multinational capital. By contrast, Kecskemét was an agrarian settlement, with industries connected to the packaging industry. When German car manufacturing companies set up a subsidiary in the town, it could make use of the plentiful labour in Kecskemét and the neighbouring settlements, where unemployment was high after 1989.

Drawing on interviews conducted in Győr between 2002 and 2004, Bartha (2011b) demonstrated that workers’ disappointment in system change, which they experienced as a process of decline in terms of the disintegration of Rába Works, which had once been a flagship of socialist industry, their material conditions, and the disintegration of communities, triggered strong resentment towards multinational companies and international capital in general. Workers developed conspiracy theories to account for the decline of their factory and the collapse of socialist industries, namely that the management and the nomenklatura had deliberately run down their factory and ‘sold’ the country to the West. The anti-elitist feelings were reinforced by the perception that the political left had deserted workers and left them to cope alone with the ills caused by system change, marketisation and globalisation. Class-based narratives were, however, alien to most interlocutors. Perceptions of exploitation were expressed in nationalist, ethnicised arguments, which pitted ‘Hungarians’ against the colonising ‘West’ or ‘hard-working ethnic Hungarians’ against the ‘lazy and welfare-dependent Roma’ (Bartha 2011a). Scheiring (2020b), too, found an absence of a class-based, shared narrative among the workers whom he interviewed. Working-class solidarity seems to have disappeared alongside the disintegration of working-class communities, which many workers addressed in the interviews (Bartha 2011b, pp. 209–36).

While the workers interviewed between 2002 and 2004 by Bartha (2011b) were by and large the ‘losers’ of system change, in a more recent research conducted between 2018 and 2020, we turned to a different group of workers: skilled and unskilled employees of multinational companies in the automotive sector, most of whom also acted as trade union organisers, shop stewards, members of works councils or even trade union leaders. As labour activists, they can also be seen as opinion-leaders in their communities. Altogether we interviewed 15 men and five women, as the majority of the trade union activists were men.

Our life-history interview project was complemented with group discussions that we had with workers alongside trade union meetings and training sessions. These discussions will be mentioned briefly at the end of this section. Four interviews will be introduced in detail, which represent four different careers and paths to labour organisations. While trade unions were traditionally deemed leftwing organisations, our interview partners were all captured, albeit to a different extent, by the siren song of neonationalism.

László was born in 1973. His life-history reads like that of an exemplary leader of the vanguard proletarian class. He was born into a working-class family typical of the late socialist era. Both his parents worked at Rába. László began as an apprentice in the same factory. After military service, he worked for a while as a truck driver. In 1996 he was enticed by the attractive wages offered by the German company at its new plant in the town. Many of its recruits had previously worked at Rába. László recalls that it was an honour to be selected by the prestigious enterprise (only 20% of 100 applications were successful) because employment in the car company immediately raised one’s socioeconomic status, with implications for marital and life prospects. László was proud to mention that his wife held two degrees. Although his job as an assembly worker was physically demanding, it was very well rewarded. From his first pay packet, he was able to buy a microwave oven, which he could not even have dreamed of doing when working as a truck driver for the military. László soon became engaged in organising a union at his new workplace:

The assembly lines employ the most people in the company. Between 100 and 200 people work in one shift. I have seen that employees don’t dare to stand up for themselves because they are afraid that they would lose their jobs. I thought that I would always find a job in my profession [toolmaker]. I was not worried about my job. I cannot be motivated solely by the promise of more money. I am motivated by the recognition that I receive in exchange for my work. Money for me is a means of exchange. It is important to make a living, but money alone cannot give me sufficient recognition for what I am doing.¹⁸

László started by organising his teammates in his shift, and then spent long hours contacting workers in other shifts (‘agitating them’, as he put it, using an old trade union expression). He was elected as shop steward and eventually became an independent trade union leader. This union organised a strike in 2019, which led to a significant wage increase and earned a national reputation for the trade union. According to László ‘that strike alone brought us 1,000 new members’. In the interview László stressed his working-class origins and socialisation:

As I mentioned to you, my parents both had a typical working-class background. How was I brought up? Hard work, and a trade (szakma), that’s what mattered. I don’t even have a high-school leaving certificate because the most important was to have a trade; this was the future, which is now past because I think that in today’s world, the working class is no longer valued, even the term ‘working class’ has been lost.¹⁹

László quickly added that he had no interest in leftwing politics; in fact, it had been necessary to convince many of his colleagues that the trade union was free of any leftwing influence in order to overcome their resistance to joining it. For László, the motivation to join the union and become a local organiser derived primarily from his strong work ethic and the urge to change things at the enterprise with which he was not satisfied. He bitterly complained about the wage gap between the technocrats and the workers, which he felt particularly unjust in the light of the perceived incompetence of some of the young engineers. Critical as he was of the post-1989 regime, in which the symbolic capital of the workers has been lost, he carefully distanced himself from the former regime, which he associated with an oppressive ideology and the privileges of the nomenklatura. While his parents had both been shop stewards, he stressed that they had never discussed politics in front of their children. László’s wife was religious; they had had a church wedding and his wife’s family harboured strong anti-communist feelings. This had contributed to his rejection of the political left.

The strong work ethic demanded by multinational companies crops up in many working-class narratives, generally serving as proof of the existence of a ‘good’ capitalism. This socialisation and success orientation function to distance ‘elite’ workers from the political left. We will take the example of Ferenc, who started his career at the German manufacturing company as a blue-collar worker, a toolmaker. At the time of our interview, he had long left the assembly line and was a team leader supervising 40 employees in the unit responsible for the development of engines, a fact of which he was rightfully very proud. He was born in 1963 and joined the company in 1994 as one of its first recruits. Ferenc attributed his success to his discipline, hard work and continuous learning, and he stressed that he demanded the same from the people he managed:

I like my work; there is a challenge in it every day. There is a great potential in the company, and your career depends on how much energy you want to put into it. I know many who started at the assembly line, and now they work as engineers or team leaders. If you just sit and wait, you’ll get nowhere. The basic requirement is that you do your job, and if you want more, you have to invest more. You pay for this when you grow old; there are many health problems that come up … but at least you can look at the mirror. Are you proud of your work? If not, you don’t have to do it. All right, there are constraints, you have to maintain your family … but I also went through the same process. Nothing was given to us on a plate. What we own, we have it thanks to our work. It was not our parents who created the material level at which we live now.²⁰

To achieve success, Ferenc internalised the logic of the multinational company and the management’s understanding of ‘deservingness’. He conceded that there was a price to be paid (‘health problems’), but in his view, material and social recognition were worth the effort of investing beyond what he called the ‘basics’. Although he did not consider himself a strict boss, he explained that he only warned his subordinates twice; if they committed the same mistake a third time, they would have to suffer the consequences, and namely they had to leave his team, where salaries and bonuses (amounting to about 30% of the standard pay) were higher than on the assembly line. He added that there was no favouritism in his unit; employees were evaluated impartially according to their performance.

Next to his activity in the trade union, Ferenc also participated in public life in the suburb where he and his wife lived. She was a schoolteacher who had established a charitable foundation, and they worked together to improve the infrastructure of their settlement. Their son worked for the same multinational as an engineer and had received a flat from his parents. Ferenc was concerned, however, about the future of his daughter: she wanted to become a psychologist, but for Ferenc this was an uncertain profession in comparison with engineering. In terms of subjectivity, like other workers old enough to recall Rába, Ferenc said that the pressures had increased. Compared to the early days of his working life in the 1990s, people no longer got together very often to socialise. Ferenc emphasised that, given the low salary earned by his wife, a teacher, he was the main breadwinner of the family. As he put it: ‘My wife can live for her hobby [teaching], I can provide for the rest’.²¹

In this male-dominated world, women had fewer options than men to ‘continuously develop’ their skills, knowledge and expertise, the precondition for promotion from the assembly line to a managerial position. In her study of the micro-electronics industry in Hungary, Acsády (2020) likewise found that women workers constituted a more vulnerable and more exploited group than men workers, who usually worked in ‘higher’ positions as skilled workers, machine operators, mechanics or tool-makers, which were less monotonous and better paid jobs than unskilled labour at the assembly lines.

We will take the example of Éva, who worked at another major car manufacturing company in Kecskemét at the time of her interview. Born in 1965, she was trained as a precision instrument maker. Éva was bitter at the time because she wanted to continue her studies but, as she put it, the poverty of her family prevented her from progressing to higher education or a better profession or trade. Factory work was not held in high esteem among the women workers interviewed in earlier research (Bartha 2011b, pp. 73–5), which could also be observed in the mid-1970s (Bartha 2019, pp. 111–12). This experience effectively alienated Éva from the socialist regime:

We were a poor family and in the communist regime, only those with connections could get the good jobs. The same was true for education. For example, only the children of the elite could learn languages. I could only choose the vocational training that the upper classes did not want.²²

The system change brought further disappointment for Éva: she lost her job, got divorced, became indebted and ended up going to Germany to earn money: ‘The mines were closed, everything was gradually closed. There emerged a great vacuum. Many people went abroad. There was no work in the region’.²³ The migration to Germany was also motivated by family tragedies: her father and her brother became alcoholics and died prematurely. Alcoholism, suicide and other issues were also mentioned in the previous research as a consequence of unemployment (Bartha 2011b, pp. 195–96). Éva eventually returned to Hungary, partly due to homesickness and partly because in Germany she was able to save enough money to buy a small house in her home village near Kecskemét. However, as she could not find a job there, she had to sell her car and soon became indebted again. After a year of unemployment, she was hired by the new plant of the German multinational company:

One’s life has been broken by these political waves … . What kind of life is this? I have started everything anew from zero for the third time. I got into debt because I had no job. Even though I have had a job for eight to ten years, I am still paying back the debts … . One wage is not enough to cover your living expenses. I know many in the village who cannot heat their houses properly in winter … . How poor Hungary is, if you take a close look.²⁴

Éva blamed low wages for the poverty of her fellow citizens, whom she contrasted with Germans and Austrians, who enjoyed considerably higher levels of consumption. She found the wage differential unjust: ‘Hungarians are hard-working people; they can work well and they like working. Wages have to be increased or there will be big trouble’. This injustice induced her to become a trade union activist and to motivate her colleagues to join:

They are militant; they have families and it matters how much money they earn. They like their job. They do not want to change because they know that it’s the same in every company, but they do want to improve their conditions and receive fair wages … . I am in direct contact with the people. Do you have a child? Can you afford a holiday with your family? This is how you can convince them [to join the union].²⁶

Despite the fact that Éva is an active trade unionist, she harbours rightwing political sympathies. Kecskemét, the town where she works, is a stronghold of the political right. In the narrative of Éva, we can identify two arguments, which are central to other working-class narratives: her conscious distancing from the former regime and the notion of ‘deservingness’, also observed by Kalb (2009) in Poland. She felt that she had no reason to be nostalgic about the socialist past when she could not study, although she also commented: ‘No matter how poor we were, we always had food and clothes. There was no danger of unemployment’.²⁷ The rise of new inequalities and the impoverishment of the people around her could have been translated into a class-based, social critique; however, in the absence of an accessible leftwing discourse, her discontent was channelled to the support of nationalistic, ethnicised arguments: ‘One thinks with a true Hungarian heart; I am a Hungarian, I will surely find a job. I came home to Hungary and could not find a job for a year’.²⁸

Flóra was born in 1968. Her life was destroyed by the alcoholism and early death of her father, and the alcoholism of her first husband, whom she divorced. She started working at a German multinational company in Győr in 1999, in order to prevent her husband from taking custody of her children, whom she had been looking after at home until then. After joining the Vasas union in 2003 and working for nine years on the assembly line, in 2008 she was elected a trade union secretary at her plant, which meant a full-time job. In addition, she commuted to Austria to work as a cleaner for an hourly wage of €10. From this money, she supported her daughter, who was at home with a small baby.

In spite of her health problems—Flóra had had seven operations on her knees—she proudly spoke of the regular trips to foreign countries that she could afford thanks to her position at the company (work-related trips) and the support of her son (who had a good job in the IT sector). Flóra, like Éva, was a militant trade unionist. She was keen to tell us the story of an incompetent Hungarian manager who had lost his job through the intervention of the works council and the trade union. Flóra’s militancy was best illustrated in her campaign to improve the working conditions of the non-contractual labour force, who were not even union members. She spoke with anger about the practice of hiring workers through a third party, who therefore, since they were not the employees of the firm, had fewer rights and less pay than the regular employees of the company. Flóra complained about the high fluctuation among these workers, adding that the trade union frequently warned the management of the poor living conditions and often miserable accommodation that awaited the agency workers, who are typically recruited from the poorer areas of Hungary.

Flóra was committed to the fight against the injustices that she had seen at the company. However, like Éva, she frequently used arguments asserting the ‘otherness’ of non-Hungarian national and ethnic cultures, for example, against the Romanian and Turkish managers who were appointed following the sacking of the abovementioned Hungarian manager, a move that Flóra had come to regret:

Try to follow Romanian or Turkish culture, I cannot even sink so deep … . The Romanian culture is, hold your tongue and work like a slave. This director … spoke to us in English and in Romanian. We spoke in Hungarian, with an interpreter. When he started yelling at me, I stood up. I am fed up with you, f—you. Since then, this director has refused to negotiate with me. I don’t care if he is a director, no one can treat me like that. But it is their culture that they look down on women. When we got rid of the Hungarian director, I could not have imagined that he was better than this new one. The company, later, employed another manager from Turkey; he is a real asshole.²⁹

In order to prove the difference between the Hungarian and Romanian ‘cultures’, Flóra divulged that the Romanian manager ordered the wearing of red, yellow and green labels among the workers indicating their performance, which ‘the idiotic Hungarian middle-managers did not dare to oppose’.³⁰

Our results confirm that transnational company culture can also generate notions of ‘deservingness’ both within the company’s workforce (between those who perform above and beyond the basic requirement and those who lack the skills or ambition to climb the enterprise ladder; and between non-contractual workers and regular employees) and the ‘in-group’ of the company’s workforce and the ‘rest’ (including welfare-dependent, mostly Roma people, who are also deemed to be criminals). The far rightwing political party Jobbik for instance, campaigned with the slogan of cigánybűnözés (‘gypsy crime’). As we will see, the party was relatively successful for this reason among the workers we interviewed.

While ethnicised arguments were still seen as taboo in the previous research (Bartha 2011a), in our new interview project the issue of the ‘otherness’ of Roma people and Roma culture frequently came up in the group discussions and at the trade union meetings that we attended. Workers went out of their way to stress their belonging to the privileged in-group by distinguishing themselves from the cultural ‘others’. The group discussions generated even more extremist views than the individual interviews. This reveals how the extreme was mainstreamed in the public media and in other information channels during the 2010s (Feischmidt & Hervik 2015). Ethnicised discourses apparently provided workers with a language and a set of cultural codes through which to voice their dissatisfaction with perceived exploitation (see also Feischmidt et al. 2014). It was a somewhat surprising finding that employees of transnational corporations, who work in a multinational environment where overt racism is explicitly forbidden, still have such strong cultural biases. This can be partly explained through the continuing East–West divide, which is most manifest in the wage gap between Germany and Hungary, and partly through the human resource and management policies of multinational companies, which pit workers against each other rather than encouraging solidarity. This point was made explicitly by some of our interview partners, who supported the then far-right political party, Jobbik, which promised a new community for ‘ethnic’ Hungarians (Szalai 2011; Feischmidt et al. 2014):

I support an alternative, which has not yet been tested in Hungary. This is a non-corrupt party, with many young people. We don’t have elderly communists or Fidesz supporters. I am more sensitive to oppression and exploitation than the average. I am not an opportunist. Here [in the factory] starting from the wage system to the treatment of the workers … . A positive attitude is needed towards the workers, who work their asses off, and who deserve better welfare provisions because they produce the value and the profit, which is ripped off by the management. In addition, the management should stop their constant lying, because their statistics and their persistent quest for more profits destroy families and cause severe social problems … . And it is outrageous that they [the workers] have been deprived of their basic rights, and that even the right to strike has been curtailed. For this I would string up Viktor Orbán and his friends from a lamp post.³¹

While the workers interviewed in earlier research were openly nostalgic about the socialist welfare state (Bartha 2011b, pp. 237–60),³² by 2018–2020 interviewees either expressed a complete lack of interest in this distant past or asserted mainly negative associations with the ‘communist dictatorship’. This can be attributed to the strongly anti-communist climate of recent decades and the absence of an alternative public sphere in which leftwing voices might make themselves heard. It is little wonder that, after 30 years of anti-communist propaganda in the mainstream media and school education, the former system is routinely dismissed as ‘criminal’ or, at best, as an equally exploitative regime.

Conclusions

This essay had three main objectives. First, we sought to demonstrate how unionism was effectively marginalised in post-1989 Hungary.³³ It was shown that after 1989 unions scored poorly in all four of the dimensions of union power that we identified. Low membership figures, the fear of unemployment, and the unfavourable legal and institutional framework rendered it almost impossible for unions to act as a cartel of workers, as business service providers or as a ‘sword of justice’. Increasingly, they have lost all political influence, to a large extent due to their role in the socialist regime. Even when MSZP was in power, arguably not enough was done to strengthen union power. The austerity policies that were implemented further alienated many workers from the political left, which failed (or refused) to represent their interests. This vacuum was filled by Fidesz, which channelled working-class resentment into the support of nationalistic, conservative, rightwing ideologies (Bartha 2011a; Scheiring 2020b).

Second, we compared the results of recent field research among workers in the car industry with earlier data to explain workers’ political choices. The older generation of workers had fond memories of socialist brigades, greater equality and the prospect of attaining modest prosperity, during an era when a house or a weekend-cottage was a realistic aspiration for many working-class families. For the younger generation, ‘communism’ evokes more negative images. While openly ethnicised arguments were rarely voiced by interview partners in previous research, for the younger generation, ‘deservingness’ and the exclusion from the community of those classified as ‘undeserving’ were common ways to demonstrate their respectability and social identity (Feischmidt et al. 2014).

Third, we sought to apply Hann’s adaptation of Polanyi to the post-1989 world of labour. While Fidesz cannot be seen as a working-class party, workers’ votes have helped the party win a two-thirds parliamentary majority at three successive elections. Confirming previous research in a different milieu (Scheiring 2020b), we found that workers failed or refused to use Marxist terminology to explain their exploitation and resentment. Instead, they subscribed to appeals for economic protectionism, more order and less liberalism. Marxist terminology is seen as an outdated relic, like socialism itself, with nothing to offer for future-oriented generations. In the absence of a credible class-based discourse, no perception of working-class solidarity can emerge.

Our findings suggest that the enterprise culture of multinational companies can also be conducive to the rise of an individualistic culture on the shop floor. The strong work ethos and commitment that is required in order to climb the enterprise ladder reinforces perceptions of ‘deservingness’. As we have seen, the multinational environment can also foster essentialised views of the culture of the ‘other’, which in turn supports the welfare-chauvinist, ethno-nationalistic discourses that underpin Orbán’s illiberal, autocratic regime.

The construction of strong, masculine identities and the confirmed role of the male breadwinner also support traditional views of the family and gender roles. As we have seen, women workers’ opportunities are usually more limited than that of their men counterparts. While Ferenc became a successful unit leader who could afford to maintain his family, Éva had problems even supporting herself, and Flóra had to work as a cleaner in Austria in order to be able to help her daughter financially. These real-life gender differences and biases also support the conservative family ideologies that Fidesz advocates (Grzebalska & Pető 2018).

Thus, we not only argue that the failure of trade unions to become a Polanyian countermovement resulted in the sweeping electoral victories of Fidesz but also show that the political sympathies and culture of core skilled workers have reinforced the long-term decline of the unions. National-level union leaders think twice before daring to articulate leftist political opinions, for fear of alienating members with rightwing political sympathies. This renders it difficult for unions to develop a clear-cut message and fulfil the role of the ‘sword of justice’, or even to aspire to deploy this power source. Moreover, political differences between national officials and the local unions destabilise the internal coherency of unions’ structures and lead to the creation of local organisations that declare themselves independent of national confederations.

In the absence of working-class communities and shared institutions, it is no wonder that workers, who are also often pitted against their fellow workers (as in the example of non-contractual workers), turn to neonationalism as a language and a set of cultural codes through which they can voice their dissatisfaction with being exploited, albeit to a lesser extent than their fellow Hungarians in the domestic sector. The ethnicised language not only endows workers with the sense of a community, but it also reinforces notions of ‘deservingness’ that the enterprise culture helps to foster.

Finally, let us note that trade unions have been facing new challenges everywhere in the world. It is increasingly apparent that a Polanyian countermovement in the world of work can only be effective if it can act on transnational flows of capital, goods and labour. In this respect, the prominence of transnational capital in the Visegrád states could see these post-socialist states become a crucible for the world.

This work was funded by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship: [grant number: NIWGE: New Industrial Workers of a Globalizing Europe H2020-MSCA-IF-2018, Project number: 846179]. András Tóth conducted the original interviews on which we rely in this essay and drafted the section on trade unions as a Polanyian countermovement. Eszter Bartha was responsible for drafting all remaining sections.

Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eszter Bartha

Eszter Bartha, Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, 4–6 Múzeum krt. Budapest 1088, Hungary. Email: [email protected]

András Tóth

András Tóth, Carl Menger Institute, Budapest, Hungary. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 In the eyes of many Western leftists and Eastern European dissidents, the postulated link between regime and workers was, of course, strongly questioned (Haraszti 1977; Konrád & Szelényi 1979; Linden 2007).

2 The term ‘welfare dictatorship’ was first used by Konrad Jarausch (see Jarausch & Duffy 1999).

3 On the failure of the attempts of the Leftist Alternative (Baloldali Alternatíva) to create (more) workers’ ownership see Mocsáry (2001), Nagy (2011) and Tütő (2019). For the prospects of the anti-capitalist left in Eastern Europe and Hungary see also Krausz (2017). On the decline of the workers’ council movement, see Szalai (1994).

4 For Hungary, see Tütő (2019).

5 There has been an impressive amount of literature on the interpretation of Hungary’s illiberal regime; here we refer to only two recent volumes, which link the rise of illiberalism with the neoliberal order: Fabry (2019), Scheiring (2020a).

6 See also Scheiring (2020a, pp. 187–216).

7 See also Fabry (2019), Scheiring and Szombati (2020).

8 Informal information from trade union leaders.

9 Flanders (1961) explores this aspect by introducing the concept of ‘business service organisation’.

10 For outlines of the Stalinist model, see Pravda and Ruble (1986), Héthy and Csuhaj (1989).

11 See Hann, this issue.

12 On the distribution of the property of SZOT, see Tóth (2020).

13 The Constitutional Court issued its decision based on an initiative of an individual. In the process, Liga supported the decision of the Constitutional Court, while SZOT did not submit any opinion, despite a request by the Court.

14 Contrary to the promise of bringing the socialist welfare state back, the socialist–liberal coalition was forced to introduce budget cuts to welfare provisions. Known as the Bokros Package, this step considerably undermined the credibility of the Hungarian Socialist Party.

15 2018. évi CXVI. Törvény, a munkaidő-szervezéssel és a munkaerő-kölcsönzés minimális kölcsönzési díjával összefüggő egyes törvények módosításáról, available at: http://ilo.org/dyn/natlex/docs/ELECTRONIC/109324/135580/F-724476989/CXVI.pdf, accessed 21 October 2021.

16 On the organisational weakness of Hungarian unions see also Girndt (2013) and Neumann (2018).

17 See also Szombati, this issue.

18 Interview with László, skilled worker, Győr, 18 June 2018.

19 Interview with László, skilled worker, Győr, 18 June 2018.

20 Interview with Ferenc, skilled worker, Győr, 5 June 2018.

21 Interview with Ferenc, skilled worker, Győr, 5 June 2018.

22 Interview with Éva, skilled worker, Kecskemét, 11 August 2018.

23 Interview with Éva, skilled worker, Kecskemét, 11 August 2018.

24 Interview with Éva, skilled worker, Kecskemét, 11 August 2018.

26 Interview with Éva, skilled worker, Kecskemét, 11 August 2018.

27 Interview with Éva, skilled worker, Kecskemét, 11 August 2018.

28 Interview with Éva, skilled worker, Kecskemét, 11 August 2018.

29 Interview with Flóra, skilled worker, Győr, 10 April 2018.

30 Interview with Flóra, skilled worker, Győr, 10 April 2018.

31 Interview with András, skilled worker, Kecskemét, 13 July 2018.

32 See also Scheiring (2020b).

33 This was true for the whole Eastern Europe. See, for example, Bohle and Greskovits (2012).