Calvin Allen is, with Peter Scherrer, the founder of the South-East Europe Review and is its Associate Editor. He assists with the language editing of the contributions which have been submitted for publication.
Currently, he is employed full-time as a Researcher for Connect, a UK trade union organising professional employees in the communications industry. Here, he specialises in analysing employees' terms and conditions of employment and in providing market information about the strategic alliances being formed by leading companies in the industry. He has been working for Connect since January 1998.
Before this, he was employed for eleven years since his graduation by the Jim Conway Foundation, an organisation specialising in delivering education and research services to trade unions. Working for the JCF, he gained experience in the transition countries of central and eastern Europe through identifying training needs and subsequently developing and leading training courses in the region. He has worked extensively in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Montenegro and Belarus, and has taught on a variety of subjects including worker participation in decision-making, modern trade unions, negotiations skills and pay systems.
More recently, and building also on his experience with applying similar programmes in the UK with his trade union employer Connect, he has also been engaged in conducting trade union audits as a means of testing and analysing the structures of union organisations in the south-east Europe region. He has worked during the last few years on such projects with unions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania. Audits can provide a foundation for trade unions to understand and interpret where they are in terms of their strategic direction and in what they need to do to deal most effectively with the problems that they face. Consequently, they can be a useful tool in the continuing re-orientation and development of trade unions.
Outside work, he enjoys football, music and film.
E-Mail: calvin@connectuk.org
