Episode 32: Between hopes and disappointment - 20 years after the CEE-enlargement

00:00:02: Imagine you want to go to a supermarket, but its products and services are only available for members of a special community.

00:00:12: You would really like to join this community, but as you look closer, you see that you can't afford the prices.

00:00:19: You call the management and ask if there is still some possibility to join.

00:00:24: They tell you, OK, first you have to work harder on yourself.

00:00:29: We see that you don't have enough money, but we believe in you.

00:00:33: You agree and work on these goals.

00:00:36: Years pass.

00:00:38: All this time, the management watches over your progress.

00:00:42: And finally, it calls you to say you have been accepted as a member.

00:00:47: You are happy.

00:00:48: But as you walk around the store and start to collect the goods you want, you realise that you are still not able to afford all of them.

00:00:57: All those years you put in so much effort to become a member and now you are disappointed that it hasn't worked out as planned.

00:01:07: In this season of We Work Europe, we'll talk about countries that have experienced just that.

00:01:14: We'll talk about the history, process and current challenges of the countries that joined the EU in.

00:01:23: Now, around twenty years later, we want to know if the disappointment in countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, etc.

00:01:33: is justified.

00:01:34: And if so, what trade unions, politics and the EU can do about it?

00:01:40: The current state of the social dialogue and its development in these countries can give us answers to these questions.

00:02:12: We start in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, and home to one point two million people.

00:02:18: It's May, twenty twenty-five, and numerous strikes are blocking almost the entire town.

00:02:24: Maybe first of all, could you present yourself?

00:02:26: Oh

00:02:26: yeah, I'm Pedro and I work at the Bulgarian news agency.

00:02:30: I'm a news editor at the world desk.

00:02:32: So what are you

00:02:34: striking for today?

00:02:35: So basically we're demanding a raise in our salaries.

00:02:38: because

00:02:39: right now I'm tired of having to spend two-thirds of my salary on rent and basically our work is severely undervalued.

00:02:47: And maybe explain a little bit the action which has been taken today, so how does it work?

00:02:53: Yeah, so all two national medias, the

00:02:57: radio,

00:02:57: the television and the news agency have gathered here today to demand a fifteen percent raise in our salaries.

00:03:04: I can give it to you in numbers.

00:03:05: It would mean a raise in less than four million left, which is about less than two million euros raised for the whole Bulgarian news agency, so that all of us can get a fifteen percent raise in our salaries.

00:03:19: Let's just strike right

00:03:20: now connected to the fact that Bulgaria will have the euro in the year.

00:03:25: No, it is not related to that.

00:03:27: It is related to the fact that our salaries have not been significantly raised in more than years.

00:03:31: And they do not reflect the inflation that's happening right now.

00:03:35: Two million euros could bring a fifteen percent raise to all the journalists in Bulgaria.

00:03:41: Doesn't sound that much, but Bulgaria has one of the lowest incomes in the EU.

00:03:47: Bulgarian workers are demanding more.

00:03:50: To put this into perspective.

00:03:52: The minimum wage in Luxembourg is two times higher than the national Bulgarian average income per person.

00:04:00: On average, a person in Bulgaria earns € one thousand three hundred euros per month.

00:04:05: The minimum wage in Luxembourg is € two thousand seven hundred euros per month.

00:04:10: Many people in the country fear that by joining the Eurozone next year and abandoning the national currency, the live life will get even more expensive.

00:04:20: Dimitar Manolov is the president of the country's second largest trade union, an ESA member, Pod Krieper.

00:04:27: His organization has joined the workers on the streets.

00:04:30: Because of the process of joining the Eurozone, was made a state budget for the next year.

00:04:37: In this state budget, to meet the criteria to join Eurozone, the part of the budget connected to the salaries of many of the Bulgarians, was very limited, if I can say so.

00:04:53: Many workers are especially concerned because there hasn't been anything like an information campaign from the government about what it means to join the Eurozone.

00:05:03: People feel lost, says Maria Petrova.

00:05:06: She's the youth representative of Podcriapa and is joining the strike.

00:05:10: They can't create us a normal, stable situation, political situation, because the last two years we have elections something like two or three times per year, so there is no one who can start to work and to full all the programme and to work on this programme just to have stability in the country.

00:05:32: However, apart from the chaos in domestic politics, many blame the European Union for this misbalance.

00:05:39: They argue that the EU hasn't kept its promise, and according to scientists, they are right.

00:05:45: Marta Kahantsova is a social researcher from Slovakia, a country that joined the EU in four and that faces similar problems.

00:05:55: EU scepticism is on the rise as well.

00:05:58: She has co-founded the Central European Labour Studies Institute, an independent, non-profit research centre.

00:06:06: Marta Karhantsova and her colleagues published the findings of their research into twenty years of the EU's Eastern enlargement.

00:06:13: In terms of working conditions, there were great expectations towards convergence.

00:06:18: Everyone was talking about convergence, especially on wages, and we know that just didn't happen.

00:06:25: And it's unrealistic to talk about it this way.

00:06:30: So, who's to blame?

00:06:32: Did the EU promise too much?

00:06:35: We can begin to find answers by looking at Bulgaria's history, which is closely connected to the history of many other post-Soviet countries.

00:06:52: Elmar Brock, EPP, was a member of the European Parliament for more than four decades.

00:06:58: He oversaw the so-called Brock reports, a series of comprehensive reports for the Parliament that built the foundation for the Central and Eastern European countries, in short, CEE countries, to join the Union.

00:07:12: For him, the EU enlargement was a historic political moment, far bigger than most people realise today.

00:07:19: We would say it's reunification of Europe.

00:07:23: Let's say it's the second part of what we call the German unification.

00:07:28: You cannot think it's a German unification without the enlargement of the European Union with Czech or with Poland, especially in other countries.

00:07:39: In some ways, he argues that the EU enlargement put a final end to the Cold War, because after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Communist Soviet Empire, the EU saw an opportunity.

00:07:53: Gunther Verhoegen was the first EU commissioner in charge of the EU's Eastern enlargement.

00:07:59: He says the enlargement of the block was Morally an absolute must, but also strategically correct.

00:08:08: Because integration means that there would be no vacuum between integrated Europe and the former Soviet Union.

00:08:15: with the exception of the Baltic countries, which were included, i.e.

00:08:19: no political no-mans land would arise, with all the risks that such a no-mans land entails.

00:08:25: So it was a strategic necessity, and ultimately also economically sensible.

00:08:31: This was correctly predicted.

00:08:33: Overall, it would strengthen the forces of growth in Europe, but not necessarily everywhere in the same way.

00:08:40: So?

00:08:40: In the early nineteen nineties,

00:08:45: politicians from the EU and the post-Soviet countries in Central and Eastern Europe started their negotiations.

00:08:52: In nineteen ninety seven, the talks became official with Estonia, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Cyprus, and in nineteen ninety nine with Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Malta and Romania.

00:09:08: These negotiations caused widespread euphoria amongst the inhabitants of the candidate countries.

00:09:14: For them, this would be the way out of post-Soviet economic misery and into the European single market.

00:09:27: I cannot deny that most of those who advocated enlargement and campaigned for it presented this opportunity for prosperity and possibly even for freedom as the central goal.

00:09:38: And I was always convinced that this could only lead to disappointment in the end.

00:09:43: Well, then of course there is the fact that the environment or the political conditions around us have changed completely in the last twenty years.

00:09:51: That the Europe of twenty-twenty-five is no longer the Europe of

00:09:57: two thousand and five.

00:10:01: But where does this misunderstanding come from?

00:10:04: And why was this misleading promise given that still reverberates within the EU today?

00:10:10: During the negotiations, the EU set out the principle that candidate countries must adopt the European social market economy.

00:10:18: This economic system allows for a free market and free exchange of goods, but is nevertheless regulated.

00:10:25: A well-developed welfare state plays an important role.

00:10:29: Wages and working conditions are usually negotiated by social partners in social dialogue.

00:10:35: Elmar Brock comments on that.

00:10:37: that was seen by candidate countries as a way of prohibition, minimizing the chance to play a role in the internal market.

00:10:51: And also in many of these countries, they have learned to social market economy from American professors.

00:11:05: who believed that that was now the right place to try to do Chicago Boys' policy in a clear new beginning.

00:11:18: By the Chicago Boys' policy, he's referring to a group of Chilean economists, prominent in the nineteen seventies and eighties.

00:11:26: They pursued a policy of strict austerity measures and significantly cut public spending.

00:11:32: They also promoted free trade agreements, and the removal of trade barriers to help Chile compete in the global market.

00:11:40: Many of them were educated at the University of Chicago, hence the name Chicago Boys.

00:11:47: Now, imagine countries that have suffered under decades of communist planned economies and have been controlled, monitored and directed by the state.

00:11:57: To them, a liberated market, without any regulatory institutions, sounded very attractive.

00:12:04: And for the European social system to work, you need social partners and institutions that know what they're doing.

00:12:11: Independent trade unions didn't exist in these Eastern countries.

00:12:16: Every form of trade union engagement was seen as a potential threat during communist times.

00:12:23: In the next episode, we're going to listen to the history of Konstantin Trenchev.

00:12:28: He founded the first independent trade union in Bulgaria and was imprisoned for that.

00:12:37: Declaring oneself a politician was much more dangerous, and people were afraid.

00:12:42: Trade unionism is something in between.

00:12:45: And many men began to join, and I became a hostage to my own creation.

00:12:50: We didn't know what collective bargaining was.

00:12:53: All these things, many trade unionists from the West came and helped us, but just the Western trade unionism.

00:13:04: If you like WeWork Europe, do give us a five-star rating and don't forget to subscribe.

00:13:15: Also, if you have any interesting topics or feedback for us, just contact isa.org.

00:13:22: WeWork Europe is the podcast from ESA, the European Centre for Worker's Questions, which receives financial support from the European Union.

00:13:31: This podcast was narrated by me, Rebecca Sharpe, script and production by Escucha Audio Identity.