Today, Eastern European economies face the challenge to create a dynamic labour market. New forms of inequality accompany a still incomplete post-socialist transformation. They are aggravated by shortcomings in setting up modern industrial relations systems and advanced human resource management practices. The transformation of work organisations has been largely a “top-down” development marked by massive governmental interference, guidelines by imported managerial staff and widespread fragmented worker representation. Market-oriented transformation in these states we find a dual structure of social inequality in work organizations: the emergence of social partnership in liberalized zones of growing prosperity and negotiable inequality patterns, co-existing with still large areas of rather moderate social and economic progress. This co-existence is likely to persist, argues the author.