On June 16th the Lithuanian parliament was supposed to vote for the so called New Social Model: a neo-liberal assault involving severe labor code liberalization, criminalization of single-motherhood (you will only receive child’s allowance if married), ‘income’ tax imposed on unemployment benefits, etc, etc. On June 15th a demonstration in opposition to the new legislation […]
In the last months the Lithuanian media has been rife with debates about the new labour legislation proposed for parliamentary vote on the 23th of June. Not very different from the French reform proposals, and pushing for further deregularization of the labour market, the code has sparked a series of protests and actions throughout the […]
Prepared by Alona Liasheva, this interview was initially published in the journal “Commons”. Jacobin is one of the most successful radical left-wing publications in the contemporary world and, for sure, the most successful one in the United States. Though the project was only started in September 2010, their online audience has reached 700 000 visitors […]
(Review: From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Haymarket Books: 2015. ) Real America has a Romanian accent and lives in Prague In Eastern Europe there is a specific way in which the class relations and social transformations which have moulded US politics get lost in a glazed landscape of critical opacity. Within the […]
This article originally appeared on LeftVoice. Philippe Alcoy interviews Mihai Varga, a Romanian specialist on trade unionism in Eastern and Central Europe and author of “Worker Protests in post-communist Romania and Ukraine,” published in August 2015. In this interview, Varga provides his vision on the state of the trade unionism in the region after the dissolution […]
This article was written a couple of months ago while the future of Ukrainian government was still unsure. I am happy to report that the ensuing events mostly confirmed my predictions: Groisman did take the seat of Prime Minister, Avakov and Petrenko entered the Cabinet and Yatsenyuk gained one more victory over the Parliament, forcing […]
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Poland’s War on Historical Memory
The electoral victory of the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) has initiated a number of changes. Being a conservative party and appealing to right-wing resentments, historical politics were always an important part of the party’s policies. A ‘fair and honest’ historical politics were a way to build a new national identity and […]
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On nurses, strikes, and public sociology
This article originally appeared on ChangingEmployment.eu by Julia Kubisa on June 08 2016. On 24th May 2016 nurses who work at the Child Health Centre, the major paediatric centre for serious illnesses in Poland, started a strike action. It means that they stopped providing care for their patients – nevertheless the care was provided by head […]
The Croatian political scene has been very lively since the last parliamentary elections held on 8th November 2015. The results of the election left both major centrist parties unable to form a majority government as the nominally left-of-centre coalition led by the Social Democratic Party (SDP) won 56 seats, while the nominally right-of-centre coalition led […]
As the UK’s referendum on the European Union approaches, Greek workers are facing more pain from Greece’s European creditors The Eurozone last week pushed Greece to accept more austerity in exchange for a loan of 7.5 billion euros to pay off the country’s debt. This comes less than a year after Greece was promised debt […]