Working and Employment Conditions in New EU Member States: Convergence or diversity? (2005), by D. Vaughan-Whitehead (ed.)
While most of the new EU member states have undergone a radical transformation in order to fulfill all membership criteria, the impact on employment and working conditions of an unprecedented shift from a planned to a free market economy (for those from Central and Eastern Europe) and sudden exposure to international competition (also hard for the two Mediterranean countries, Malta and Cyprus) has yet to be documented.

The present volume, produced by a working group of leading experts in this field, offers two main original contributions:

  • it provides information for the first time on practices at enterprise level through a series of case studies in several new member states;
  • it identifies how the different elements of the World of Work – employment contracts, working time, wages, social dialogue and workers’ participation, reconciliation of work and family – are combined, interact and are negotiated at local level.

This comprehensive study presents timely information on trends in working and employment conditions in the 10 new EU member states within a year of their accession, but also – by comparison with the other EU member states – provides new insights into general trends that we may expect – between convergence and diversity – in an enlarged EU.

This book thus offers a new window onto the essential but relatively unknown social dimension of the EU enlargement process.