The Europeanization of Trade Unions in the Countries of the EU's Eastern Enlargement
Survey of Trade Union Leaders
Version 1.0, published: Nov. 5, 2023.
Open Access
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Description
The data collection covers the integration of trade unions from East Central European countries into EU governance, namely integration at the EU level, in EU works councils and in interregional trade union councils.
The data collection presents the results of questionnaire-based interviews with the leaderships of the most important trade unions from the six largest EU member states which joined during the Eastern enlargement (namely Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia). It includes all general national trade union associations plus national branch associations for metals, mining, retail trade/commerce and banking/finance. Altogether 50 trade unions from the countries under study have been included in the analysis through interviews with 101 trade union leaders. 6 trade unions meeting the selection criteria were not available for interviews.
All interviews (with 8 exceptions in the case of Poland) were conducted face-to-face by the responsible project partners or by trained interviewers working for them. In nearly all cases, interviews were conducted at the headquarters of the respective trade union. The average length of an interview was about 60 minutes. All interviews, with only 3 exceptions, were recorded electronically with the explicit consent of the respective respondent.
The data collection consists of (1) a description of the full research design of the respective research project, which includes the design and questionnaire of the interviews (file "research-design.pdf"), (2) the instructions given to the interviewers concerning the documentation of the interviews (file "guidelines_interview-documentation.pdf") and (3) the results of the interviews, i.e. the answers of all 101 respondents to the 48 closed questions entered into one Excel data sheet (file "results.xlsx").
Keywords
Trade Unions East Central Europe Hungary Poland European Union Accession Bulgaria Czechia Romania Slovakia Europeanization Works Councils Interregional Trade Union Councils
Language of data
Disciplines
Comparative Politics European Studies Sociology