CELSI Frontiers Seminar on „The sources of public employees' bargaining power – the case of healthcare and education in East Central Europe“ by`Imre Gergely Szabó`http: /en/people/detail/31/imre-gergely-szabo/ _(Central European University, Budapest) will take place at CELSI in Bratislava on September 3, 2013.This presentation explores the different answers that public sector workers gave to crisis-induced austerity in East Central Europe. To assess the variety of responses, a comparison will be drawn between the healthcare and the education industry in three countries: Estonia, Slovakia and Hungary. Moving beyond institutional approaches, I will highlight two underlying factors that can help us explain different outcomes in the two industries: structural power and coalitional engineering. It is not the specific industrial relations institutions of the public sector that gives more or less power to doctors, nurses and teachers, but their different labour market position and their different capacities to create overarching alliances around defending the quality of public social services. Using Beverly Silver’s framework, I will claim that hospital workers have higher structural power than teachers. This power was manifested in the recent bargaining successes that doctors and nurses achieved all over the region through the threat of mass emigration. Nevertheless, education workers in special cases are able to overcome their weaker structural position by building strategic alliances, as it happened during the 2012 teachers’ strike in Estonia.