Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Budapest and FES Regional Project on Labour Relations and Social Dialogue, Warsaw February 2013 Trade unions in Hungary 2012: New hope in a year of woes? Author: Rainer Girndt 1 , Looking back at 2012 Hungary’s trade unions find little comfort in the past year. They had to swallow many a bitter pill. To employee interest representatives,‘2012 was a year of woes’, workers councils´ chairman Imre Palkovics sums up the past twelve months. Hungary’s smallest union confederation has most of its members among people doing physical work but it is that particular group who saw their real wages shrink 6–8 percent in value, mainly following enactment of flat tax legislation. 2013 marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning decline of the state-controlled unitary union movement and the nascence of new trade unions as authentic representatives of employee interests. Is the outgoing year likely to bring about a change for the ever-divided union movement, and if so, in which direction? 1 M.A., Sociologist, born 1939 in Breslau/Wroclaw; held numerous positions in political and union education projects; with contacts to unions in Hungary for forty years now; in the 1990s, head of FES project‘Labour relations and union cooperation’ in Budapest, recently active in advisory services and as commentator. 1