The cartographies of Baltic labour resistance

The conjuncture between the thirtieth anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR is an apt occasion to revisit the trajectories of change in the post-Soviet space. In their article ‘Baltic Labour in the Crucible of Capitalist Exploitation: Reassessing “Post-Communist” Transformation’, recently published in the Economic and Labour Relations Review, Andreas Bieler and Jokubas Salyga assess ‘post-communist’ transformation in the Baltic countries from the perspective of labour. The authors argue that the uneven and combined unfolding of 'post-communist' transformation has subjected Baltic labour to doubly constituted exploitation processes. First, workers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have suffered from the extreme neo-liberal restructuring of economic and employment relations at home. Second, migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in general, trying to escape exploitation at home, have faced another set of exploitative dynamics in host countries in Western Europe such as the UK. Nevertheless, workers have continued to challenge exploitation in Central and Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, and have been active in extending networks of transnational solidarity across the continent.