Mission accomplished? Reflections on labour relations and working environment in the Baltic States.

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Another ‘year of living dangerously’  

The Marie Curie chairholder in the Baltic States, Charles Woolfson, reports that the second year of his activities is  at an end, and the third and final year is in sight. “It has been an exhausting but exciting year” says Woolfson, “and there have been a few more ups and downs than I would normally be comfortable with, but the project seems set to achieve its major targets”.

Year 2 of the project has seen the chair continue his mission to teach and research on issues of industrial relations and working conditions in the rapidly changing economic environment of the region. Such issues are ‘new’ to Baltic academic and policy discussion, but both are of considerable interest and concern to the European Commission. The Commission is funding the project, via the host organization, the University of Latvia, following the closure of the EuroFaculty. The question of labour standards in the new member states has become of special significance following the Laval controversy between Latvian construction workers and Swedish trade unions, which has resulted in a case now before the European Court of Justice. Labour migration from the new member states and its impact on labour standards in the wider European Union seem set to remain important topics of European integration in the next period.

An important development in the last year is the co-authoring of publications with younger scholars in the Baltic and Nordic area with whom the chair is now actively collaborating. Among the highlights of this year’s chair activities has been the continuing flow of publications in international peer review journals, as well as current or forthcoming publications in academic journals in all three national languages of the Baltic States. The chair continues to provide Doctoral supervision to candidates across the major universities in the region, as well as to deliver a challenging lecture series entitled “New Aspects of European Integration” to Masters students in European Studies, Administration, Public Health and Law departments in Tartu, Riga and Vilnius. Even closer involvement in the supervision of Masters dissertations through developing links with the Centre for European and Transition Studies is anticipated in the next period. 

At European level the chair has been “high profile”, including a “success story” feature in the Commission’s new online newsletter for mobile researchers, a keynote address at a major European conference on research mobility, presentations at the launch of the European Research Mobility Centres in Latvia and in Lithuania, and papers delivered at more than a dozen international workshops and academic conferences. “Stakeholder” audiences have not been neglected either, and the chair has shuttled to meetings from Warsaw to Stockholm to Vienna to give presentations on emerging labour issues to trade union confederations  at Baltic, Nordic and European wide levels.

“Looking back on the last period, when I arrived in the Baltic States to fulfill my mission as a ‘wandering professor’, I foolishly said – Give me unlimited air tickets and mobile internet for my laptop” Woolfson recalls, “and it has all turned out to be horribly true. Probably one of my greatest achievements to date is to be Air Baltic’s ‘most frequent flyer’. Not many people would admit to that”.

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