The National Confederation of Workers’ Councils (MOSZ) and the European Centre for Workers’ Questions (EZA) organised an online conference together. It was hold on 25 November 2020 and streamed from Budapest. The title of the conference was “New types of organisational challenges. The significance of alternative labour”. The conference was supported by the European Union.
The online seminar was interpreted in 7 languages and was attended by Hungarian, Serbian, German, Polish, English, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Croatian representatives of workers’ organisations among others.
The opening speech was given by Imre Palkovics, President of the National Confederation of Workers' Councils. In his speech, Imre Palkovics said that in our new type of world we are looking for answers to new types of challenges. At today’s seminar, we are trying to explore connections to which the latest challenge in our lives, the pandemic situation, provides current answers. This current situation is not only a huge challenge for the health care system, but we also encounter situations in the world of work that call into question and rewrite our current legal system. Our colleagues are constantly in need of our information and advice because of the situation that has developed.
The basic challenge is the growing size of the reorganization of professions. Some professions are becoming more valuable, while other professions that have been considered important so far, are disappearing. Demand for seemingly secure occupations such as accounting is declining. Long-term employment is disappearing, jobs are becoming more specialized, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a uniformized wage system, and income inequality is growing at both regional and professional levels. Solidarity is disappearing. Trade unions must demand that profits should be made from profit-sharing! Telecommunications, energy, information technology and logistics are now the driving force. The possibility of traditional sectoral wage negotiations is also being reduced, and we need to find new solutions to new situations. International solidarity is becoming increasingly important, and cross-border cooperation is emerging and providing solutions to certain situations due to cross-border employment.
Dr. Habil. Attila Sándor Kun, Professor and Head of Department at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary (KRE), Faculty of Law, Department of Labour Law and Social Security and Professor at the Hungarian National University of Public Service (NKE), Faculty of Public Governance and International Studies, Department of Human Resources delivered a speech on competition law challenges of workers' freedom of association.
Attila Kun began his presentation with a fundamental question to which he seeks an answer: does the movement aspirations of self-employed entrepreneurs have a raison d’être? In his presentation, he said that 16 per cent of the self-employed work for one client only. These include innovative digitized business models such as platforms, the gig economy, and working online. The self-employed are characterized by a very colourful, dynamic layer of workers, but they work in great legal uncertainty, in the extensive “grey zone”.
Bjørn Anders van Heusden, Executive Secretary of the World Organization of Workers, an organizational futurologist, explained that the jobs of the future will change completely after COVID. “Home office” and teleworking have reached unprecedented proportions, and employers are already realizing that working from home does not impair employee efficiency. The home office has won the support of business leaders and because of this, there will be changes and modifications at all levels of companies.
Through a practical example, Dr. Imre Szilárd Szabó, Head of Office of the National Confederation of Workers’ Councils (MOSZ) and Instructor and Assistant Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Department of Labour Law and Social Security, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary presented what alternative solutions there are in Hungary. All this is a new narrative in industrial relations, new actors, levels, themes and regulatory challenges (hybrid bargaining). The three pillars of the fundamental right to freedom of association, for instance the three most basic categories of industrial relations (trade union, collective bargaining, strike), are also being dissolved, transformed and gaining a new narrative, terminology and range of interpretation today. Trade unions with innovative, open, network-like organizational logic and other alternative, flexible advocacy structures are emerging.
Jovita Pretzsch, Vice President of the Lithuanian LPS Solidarumas shared her Lithuanian experience with the audience. Food carriers went on strike in Vilnius. They were not recruited to any of the unions, yet they were able to organize the strike.
Dr. Ildikó Rácz, Instructor and Assistant Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Department of Labour Law and Social Security, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary was talking about the changes of workers' association in the 21st century. She said that the term “platform economy” is used consistently by Orly Lobel in her study “The Law of the Platform”. The bottom line is that there is a paradigm shift not only in business operations, but also in legal theories. After all, things that could not be made a commodity so far have entered the market; the domination of ownership was replaced by the realm of access. These circumstances, in turn, run counter to conventional legal theories so the essence of the platform economy is not to create new business models, organizational strategies, and so on but in the legal theoretical transformations it entails. This type of economy is derived from, embedded in, and characterized by the significant role played by platforms at any stage of the economic supply chain.
In his closing speech Gábor Holecz, Vice-President for Public Sector of the National Confederation of Workers’ Councils, emphasized that the legal framework for self-employment seems to be closing. It is worth starting the fight, confirming this intention. It would be good to know more about international legal cases and to take a united approach to trade unions and the self-employed. For the trade union movement, this is the task of the future. Barriers to competition need to be dismantled, which could obviously be the result of a longer struggle.