In the context of economic growth and a strong labour movement, the Slovenian trade unions have become neocorporative interest organisations in the 1990s – a relatively developed system of centralised and inclusive collective bargaining has been established. In the process of Slovenia’s integration into the European Union and the Euro-zone, trade unions agreed upon anti-inflation policies and in the tripartite dialogue managed to defend relatively high standards of employment security inherited from the previous economic system, which have, at the same time, been subject to labour market segmentation. After 2004, deterioration of social dialogue at the national level has been accelerating, resulting in the “concession bargaining”, which means looking for compromises. To the unilateral government’s attempts to implement the neoliberal reform, trade unions responded quite successfully with the mobilisation of citizens. Yet at the same time, from the independence onwards, trade unions gradually and unevenly, with some outstanding drops, are losing their members. This trend is partially due to the segmentation of the labour market, which is the systemic consequence of the increase of precarious work alongside the general deterioration of standards regarding legal security of employment. Establishing trade union representation of precarious workers who share the sense of insecurity, deprivation and often agree to self-deprivation is extremely difficult. Industrial trade unionism seems to be in such cases less efficient and inappropriate. For example, migrant and female workers are very much deprived on labour market and the situation is characterised by a high level of turnover between employers and also between economic sectors. They are successfully addressed by the quasi-trade union – Labour Counselling Service (Delavska svetovalnica), an advocacy for vulnerable groups association, which can be seen as a concealed (active assistance for workers to benefit from the labour and social rights and their public advocacy) and atypical union (an atypical membership base and different trade union approaches). It represents an extremely vulnerable segment of workers that lacks advocacy. The Labour Counselling Service brings cases of generic infringements of workers’ rights to the public. Through regular calls to the competent national institutions and with very well-developed network of supporters they tend towards systemic changes and are so far successful. The approach is radical and by using media interventions the Labour Counselling Service exercises confrontational unionism that exposes extreme exploitation and thus strengthens the opposing stand of labour towards capital.
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