Vera Trappmann

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Leeds

This article examines the legitimising frames young workers in England and Germany apply to precarious work. Through qualitative biographical interviews with 63 participants, the article shows that in most cases, young precarious workers saw work insecurity as an unavoidable fact of life whose legitimacy could not realistically be challenged. Fou...

Labour unrest by platform workers is a growing global phenomenon, but several questions require deeper understanding. What motivates platform labour unrest? Which actors and strategies are involved? How does this vary across regions? Systematic answers are hindered by the lack of large datasets. Uniquely, this article analyses a global dataset comp...

Die Studie beruht auf einer repräsentativen Beschäftigtenumfrage. Die Erhebung doku-mentiert erstmals mit einem Fokus auf Beschäftigte, wie diese über den Klimawandel und die anstehende sozial-ökologische Transformation denken. Sie zeigt, dass sich Beschäf-tigte in der Tendenz gut informiert fühlen und zugleich sehr besorgt über den Klimawandel sin...

With the increasing popularity of the radical right, much research has tried to explain the motives of voters. Less attention has been paid to the motives of people to become radical right activists – specifically young people, a group with a high tendency to join right-wing parties. Within the context of the internationalisation of the radical rig...

This paper asks about the perception of class structures among young adults in Germany. Inspired by the work of Andrew Sayer (The Moral Significance of Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005a; Sociology, 39(5), 947–963, 2005b; Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, New York: Springer, 163–178, 2010) and Axel Honneth (Leviathan, 9(3/4),...

This article examines the legitimising frames young workers in England and Germany apply to precarious work. Through 63 qualitative biographical interviews, the article shows that most young precarious workers saw work insecurity as an unavoidable fact of life whose legitimacy could not realistically be challenged. Four frames are identified which...

The report offers the first global dataset of labour protests of key workers during the pandemic. It focusses on two sectors, healthcare and retail. The results show that, overall, despite large volumes of protest over acute COVID-related problems such as the provision of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the main concern of protesting workers d...

Decarbonising industry is crucial to achieving net zero. This report focuses on the energy intensive or Foundation Industries (FIs) which include the metals, chemicals, glass, cement, pulp and paper and ceramics sectors1. In the UK, the FIs account for around 50 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year and face huge challenges in achieving net zero...

This paper presents findings from the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest, a database of platform worker protest events around the world which gathers data from online news media reports and other online sources. For the period January 2017 to July 2020, we identified 1,271 instances of worker protest in four platform sectors: ride-hailing, food...

Blog for ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre: https://digit-research.org/blog_article/three-unanswered-questions-about-eu-directive-on-gig-work/

The existing literature lacks an exploration of this interplay between new and ‘old’ collective actors in the struggle to ensure that the interests of workers in the platform economy are effectively represented. This chapter fills this gap by examining and contributing to a better understanding of the couriers’ road to mobilization, as well as of t...

Labour unrest by platform workers is an important phenomenon in the new world of work. This study examines patterns of platform labour unrest on a global scale, drawing from a database of over 500 instances of labour unrest in the food delivery sector. Results show that labour unrest has been growing in recent years and has spread across a large nu...

This article explores the relational and moral aspects of the perception of class structure and class identifications by young people in objectively vulnerable labour market conditions in Poland and Germany. Drawing on 123 biographical interviews with young people in both countries, it demonstrates that young precarious Poles and Germans tend to id...

The newly developed Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest provides an overview of the developments in platform worker organisation and mobilisation on a global scale. Its findings so far reveal that: − The main cause globally for labour protest is pay, with considerable geographical variation when it comes to other causes for dispute. − Types of...

In the context of debates on the meanings of precarious employment, this article explores the varied ways young workers in Poland and Germany are managing precarity. Biographical narrative interviews with 123 young people revealed four different ways interviewees experienced precarity. These different approaches reflected varied ways in which inter...

The newly developed Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest provides an overview of the developments in platform worker organisation and mobilisation on a global scale. Its findings so far reveal that: The main cause globally for labour protest is pay, with considerable geographical variation when it comes to other causes for dispute. Types of plat...

Publikacja stanowi podsumowanie kluczowych wyników projektu naukowego PREWORK – "Młodzi pracownicy prekaryjni w Polsce i Niemczech: socjologiczne studium porównawcze warunków pracy i życia, świadomości społecznej i aktywności obywatelskiej" prowadzonego w latach 2016-2020. Poszczególne rozdziały dotyczą m.in. definicji prekaryjnego zatrudnienia, sy...

The publication is a summary of the key results of the PREWORK scientific project - "Young precarious workers in Poland and Germany: a comparative sociological study on working and living conditions, social consciousness and civic engagement " carried out in 2016-2020. Chapters concern, among others, the definition of precarious employment, the sit...

This article explores the selected cases of the biographies of right-wing supporters from a larger sample of narrative interviews with young (18-35 years old) people in Poland and Germany. In the existing literature, we can find the socio-economic explanations of the sources of the right-wing turn (related to economic deprivation, precarisation, so...

Dieser Beitrag fragt nach der Wahrnehmung von Klassenstrukturen unter jungen Erwachsenen in Deutschland. Inspiriert durch die Arbeiten von Andrew Sayer (2005, 2010) und Axel Honneth (1981) zur Bedeutung von Alltagsmoral und Klassenbewusstsein wird untersucht, inwiefern die moralische Dimension sozialer materieller Ungleichheit kritische Perspektive...

In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effective...

This study investigates the social protection of workers in the platform economy at the request of the European Parliament's Employment and Social Affairs Committee. The report reviews literature and previous research on the platform economy with the aims of defining it and developing a typology for understanding its nature. It discusses the growth...

By examining executives’ cognitive concepts of responsibility and the CSR activities of companies in three latecomers to explicit Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) – East and West Germany, Poland and Hungary – we show that the speci!c contexts matter for both. However, attitudes and activities are not in a deterministic relation. In (West) Germ...

We use micro-level analysis of developments in the steel sector in Poland, Romania and Slovakia to examine the effects of multinational corporations on trade unions in Central and Eastern Europe. We argue that unions’ weakness can be attributed to their strategies during the restructuring and privatization processes of post-communist transition. Ta...

Business leaders exert extraordinary influence on institution building in market economies but they think and act within institutional settings. This book combines both an elite approach with a varieties-of-capitalism approach. Comparing Poland, Hungary and East and West Germany, we perceive the transformations in East Central Europe and in Germany...

The debate surrounding the erosion of the “German model” has fundamental flaws with respect to business leaders as crucial actors. First, the dynamic of career changes are still disputed; second, top-managers of banks, although they play an important role for the dissolution of the “Germany Ltd.” (“Deutschland AG”), are rarely systematically includ...

This chapter analyzes the effect of labour representation at company level. It looks into whether the existence of works councils or trade-union committees have an effect on business leaders’ attitudes towards the role of business in society, as well as any effect on leadership style and company policies. Three results are particular revealing: 1....

This chapter explores how business leaders perceive the responsibility of business for the wider society. With a newly developed theoretical design, we can identify a variety of cognitive concepts of responsibility, linking these to the institutionalist CSR debate. Our findings show great country-specific variations. While in West Germany the neoco...

This article describes the evolution of social dialogue and collective bargaining in Poland between 2008 and 2012, arguing that the effects of the crisis have been asymmetrical in two ways. First, while Poland is the only EU country to have avoided recession in macroeconomic terms, the crisis has actually disproportionately affected labour through...

Corporate social responsibility is a young phenomenon in Central Eastern Europe. While during socialism, companies had an integral social function, the managers in East Central Europe were very keen to get rid of the social very quickly following a pure Friedmanite approach towards business “the goal of a company is to make profit”. It is only with...

This book challenges the one-sided account of Poland as a successful transition case, by exploring the huge social costs for workers in terms of impoverishment and employment precarity. The ambivalent role of the European Union in the economic restructuring of Poland emerges through comparisons to earlier rounds of restructuring of steel in Western...

This chapter presents the company case study. After briefly sketching the role of Huta Lenina in Polish history, we will study its development from a landmark of socialism into a subsidiary of a global steel company. We will in particular reconstruct the employment restructuring across the three phases 1990–1998, 1999–2003, 2004–2006). During the f...

To understand restructuring in Poland, it is necessary to sketch the political, economic and social context in which it took place. The aim of the chapter is to position the empirical study within a historical and theoretical framework. We will briefly discuss the Polish economic transformation path and the role of the EU and its enlargement policy...

In the course of this chapter, we will trace the restructuring of steel on a national level, investigating the role of the state, external investors and the EU in the course of the restructuring of Polish steel. We can distinguish three phases of restructuring during which the external influence of the EU and of investors were steadily increasing:...

The influence of the EU on domestic Polish policies varied greatly before and after accession. Before accession, the EU’s influence was most powerful, establishing an enlargement regime aiming to “socialise” the Central Eastern countries into the institutional order of the European Union, based on power asymmetry. After accession, the influence of...

Nowa Huta does not have a good reputation in Poland. Not only is its name blackened by prejudices dating from Communist times or the current difficult socio-economic conditions, but the media has also drawn a very negative picture of the town and the region. The press reports violence on its streets or loitering teenage gangs, claiming that Nowa Hu...

The study offered an integrative analysis of restructuring in the new Europe, combining the macro with the meso- and micro-levels. We have learned how company restructuring is shaped by explicit external demands, global pressures, national institutions and local path-dependencies and what dramatic consequences it entails for individuals and local c...

In this chapter, we will determine the influence industrial relations had on the restructuring of the Polish steel industry. The steel industry was one of the rare cases where sectoral social bargaining contributed to developing a framework for privatisation and restructuring of the industry. This was exceptional. In most sectors, unions did not ma...

While in previous chapters we have dealt with the economic reform programme, the role of social dialogue, and the EU’s direct influence on steel restructuring through its demands in the realm of competition policy, in this chapter we will analyse the extent to which regional and labour-market policy influenced positively or negatively the restructu...

This chapter will shed light on what became of redundant steelworkers. The previous chapters have revealed the strong belief in entrepreneurship amongst political and, in particular, labour-market actors, management and trade unions. Interestingly, this belief in entrepreneurship contradicts public assumptions, or even workers’ (self-)perceptions,...

The paper examines the steel industry at the micro level in Poland, Romania and Slovakia, and analyses the sources of weakness of once-strong labour unions and the reasons for their fragile regeneration. First, it shows that weakness can be attributed to unions’ strategies during the restructuring and privatization processes of post-communist trans...

Research on East Central Europe has been a late-comer to the debate on Social Corporate Responsibility (CSR). The transition from planned to market economies dramatically changed the role of companies in those societies and led to a massive externalization of social functions previously held by enterprises under state socialism. Under the increasin...

The paper looks into experiences of redundancies of steelworkers in the UK and in Germany. It analyses how workers coped with redundancy and what helped them in professional re-orientation. While the politics of national labour market institutions influenced by the European Union’ policies claim that only training can improve workers’ employability...

The debate surrounding the erosion of the “German model” has fundamental flaws with respect to business leaders as crucial actors. First, the dynamic of career changes are still disputed; second, top-managers of banks, although they play an important role for the dissolution of the “Germany Ltd.” (“Deutschland AG”), are rarely systematically includ...

The paper analyses steel restructuring at one of the major steel companies in Poland. It traces the restructuring history from the 1990s up to recent times, arguing that restructuring was heavily influenced by EU-accession conditionality and by the sector-oriented policy of Polish trade unions. While steel restructuring is often considered a major...

Survey data of business leaders in Germany, Poland and Hungary are used to a picture of their careers and their orientations. An overall evaluation would allow one to classify the West German business leaders as the most ‘corporatist’ and socially committed, most sceptical about shareholder value but also the least alienated and etatist. The Polish...

Although German trade unions have historically played a vital role in the vocational education and training system, their focus has traditionally been on initial vocational training and education (IVET) at the expense of continued vocational education and training (CVET). However, recent changes in the German labour market, in particular the growin...

Political economy analyses capitalism in East-Central Europe with two approaches. Using the first approach, it looks into the institutional varieties of market economies that have come into being in the past 20 years and places the countries on a continuum from liberal to coordinated. In this way, differences between national economies are brought...

Civil society organisations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have remained weak players compared to their counterparts in established democracies. Given the particular incentives that the EU offered for the empowerment of nonstate actors during pre-accession, it has often been assumed that EU intervention improved this situation. We argue that,...

Der Beitrag analysiert die Gründe für die Schwächung der Gewerkschaften in Mittel- und Osteuropa auf betrieblicher Ebene. Am Beispiel der Stahlindustrie in Polen, Rumänien und der Slowakei zeigt er, dass die Gewerkschaften Legitimität und Unterstützung bei den Belegschaften aufgrund ihrer Verwicklung in die Restrukturierung der Unternehmen verloren...

Although German trade unions have historically played a vital role in the vocational education and training system, their focus has traditionally been on initial vocational training and education (IVET) at the expense of continued vocational education and training (CVET). However, recent changes in the German labour market, in particular the growin...

The article analyses the reasons for union weakness in Central and Eastern Europe at the micro level. Examination of the steel industry in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia shows how in all three countries, the unions at company level have lost legitimacy and support with the rank and file due to their activities during restructuring, albeit for opposi...

Der Beitrag analysiert die Gruende fuer die Schwaechung der Gewerkschaften in Mittel- und Osteuropa auf betrieblicher Ebene. Am Beispiel der Stahlindustrie in Polen, Rumaenien und der Slowakei zeigt er, dass die Gewerkschaften Legitimitaet und Unterstuetzung bei den Belegschaften aufgrund ihrer Verwicklung in die Restrukturierung der Unternehmen ve...

Auf der Basis eines Datensatzes über mittelständische Unternehmen in Deutschland werden Zusammenhänge zwischen flexibilisierten Arbeitsvertragsgestaltungen und Betriebsmerkmalen untersucht. Zudem werden Befristung und Leiharbeit im Lichte der Kombination von Arbeits- und Führungskräftepolitik betrachtet. Flexibilisierte Arbeitsvertragsgestaltungen...

The authors examine how the fate of the Polish steel industry, and in particular of steel workers, developed after the change of regime. First, at national level, the downsizing of the sector, its international context (especially the relationship between Poland and the European Union) and the role of trade unions in the transformation are reviewed...

The introduction to the Special Issue on economic elites in Central Eastern Europe establishes a common understanding of elite research and the development of capitalism in Central Eastern Europe as developed during the 1990s. Since then, the composition of elites has been lost sight of by research. The article identifies areas which future researc...

The article explores the new policy frameworks for learning and skills formation in Germany, Norway and Spain. It asks whether a new type of regulation for training is emerging, and how employers and trade unions engage with such developments. It ends arguing that there are competing dynamics, strategic directions and actor-related issues within th...