Employee ‘voice’ and working environment in post-communist New Member States: an empirical analysis of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Charles Woolfson, Dace Calite and Epp Kallaste ABSTRACT This article examines employee ‘voice’ in workplace health and safety in three Baltic New Member States by means of a cross-national survey. The data point to unre- solved problems of voice in the context of rather poor working environments. These present opportunities for collective renewal by trade unions, but paradoxically are more likely to be addressed by employers in the context of significant labour shortages created by a post-European Union accession labour ‘exit’. INTRODUCTION It has become a conventional academic wisdom that among the key social benefits of European Union (EU) enlargement for the New Member States (NMS), in addition to enhanced information and consultation rights and non-discrimination measures, has been an improvement of occupational health and safety practice through the legislative transposition of EU Directives (Kohl and Platzer, 2004). While some have questioned the success of the institutional transfer of a European ‘Social Model’ in the process of enlargement (Meardi, 2007; Vaughan-Whitehead, 2005), the adoption of new legislative frameworks in the area of working environment is characterised as evidence of the spread of a European ‘social dimension’ to the NMS. Health and safety is seen as an important area of EU competence and has been regarded as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the EU’s social policy achievements (Smismans, 2003: 55). In those NMS without established, or only weak, traditions of employee representation in health and safety, it is arguably unlikely that representation for employees in matters of health and safety would have been mandated in domestic legislation but for the social acquis requirements. Pressure from the European Commission, particularly in the period of legislative alignment prior to accession, has produced significant ❒ Charles Woolfson is Professor of Labour Studies, School of Law, University of Glasgow, Dace Calite is Lecturer in Sociology, University of Ventspils, Latvia, and Doctoral Candidate, Department of Sociol- ogy, University of Latvia, and Epp Kallaste is Doctoral Student, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu, Estonia. Correspondence should be addressed to Professor Charles Woolfson, School of Law, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK; email: c.woolfson@law.gla. ac.uk Industrial Relations Journal 39:4, 314–334 ISSN 0019-8692 © 2008 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA.