Slovenia: neo-corporatism under the neo-liberal turn

In: Employee relations, Band 40, Heft 4, S. 709-724

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reveal the formation and development of Slovenia's neo-corporatist industrial relations system in the 1990s, and its change which overlaps with Slovenia's accession to the EU and the eurozone.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is based on the presumption that the transitional processes engaged in by the societies of "real socialism" were merely part of a larger and deeper transition – the great recommodification of the post-war decommodified societies of European democratic capitalism.FindingsAlready by the mid-1990s, the Slovenian industrial relations system contained all key features of the neo-corporatist regimes emerging after the Second World War in the European systems of democratic capitalism. Like those systems, in the 1990s Slovenia also saw a system being formed of political exchanges based on wage restraint policy. The combination of this wage policy and appropriate national monetary policy facilitated the Slovenian economy's competitiveness and above-average growth. Slovenia was a success story.Originality/valueThe Slovenian system started to change in the middle of the last decade. The trigger of this change was Slovenia's entry to the eurozone. Since then, Slovenian neo-corporatism has been subject to systematic deregulation. Despite this, the analysis suggests the Slovenian industrial relations system still contains a coordinating mechanism that distinguishes it from other "post-communist", and, generally speaking, liberal market economies.