This project explores how May Day rituals – once central to socialist public life – have been reimagined by trade union confederations in Poland, Ukraine, and East Germany from 1989 to 2019. Through a comparative lens, it examines how these annual celebrations have evolved in three countries marked by different trajectories of post-socialist transformation: institutional continuity in Ukraine, discontinuity within continuity in Poland, and a complete rupture in East Germany.
Drawing on qualitative methods — including archival research, interviews with trade unionists, and a critical review of existing literature — the project asks: How have trade unions reshaped May Day in response to the political and economic transformations of the last three decades? And how do these commemorations reflect broader shifts in post-socialist memory cultures?
By centering trade unions as key actors in the making of public memory, the project fills a crucial gap in research on post-socialist transformations — offering new insights into how labor movements remember, reinterpret, and reframe the past.
The project is funded by the National Science Centre within the program Preludium under grant agreement 2024/53/N/HS6/04017.