Originally from Dispute Resolution Journal

As news reports from around the world relay, a free market economy may not be all that it's cracked up to be, especially where the economy is as fragile as those in some Eastern European nations. There, government leaders, practitioners and academicians are centering their attention on the consequences and impacts of their democratization efforts. One focus coming out of the Republic of Hungary is the quandary of union/management disputes and the effect that conventional strikes and lock-outs would and could have on that nation's fledgling free market economy.

Though unions and union disputes existed during Hungary's more than four decades of socialism, for the most part those unions were government sanctioned: what Americans know as "company unions."