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Hungary

After 198,9 the monolith and obligatory trade union organization in Hungary broke up, with six confederations based on voluntary membership emerging. Membership figures were mostly influenced by the process of economic transition and the strategy of trade unions that focused on political bargaining instead of industrial action, leading to an overall decline to around 300000 members out of a 4.2-4.5 million employees. The most unionized sectors are public administration, education, health care, electricity, transportation, car making industry. Trade unions operate mostly on the basis of financial subsidies received from the government as part of the EU initiatives to strengthen social parternship.

Memory work is rare. The Forum for the Cooperation of Trade Unions (Szakszervezetek Együttműködési Fóruma), the confederation of trade unions within the public sector has an education program which consists of topics of history. Commemorative acts are limited to sporadic events without much publicity or regularity. While the Archives of Political History and the Trade Unions holds important material on the history of trade unions, there is no centralized archive collecting documents neither producing specialist publications. After a low tide of labor history post-1989, there is again renewed historiographic interest in research on adjacent topic, including the broader history of social emancipation in modern Hungary.

Photo by Péter Záray, Fortepan.hu, 1986.

The 'Silver Beach' resort of the Nationwide Trade Union Council (SZOT) at Balatonszéplak. SZOT was the party-state controlled umbrella organization of Hungarian trade unions during the state socialist regime (1948-1990).