German trade unions between neoliberal restructuring, social partnership and internationalism

Explaining leaving union membership by the degree of labour market attachment: Exploring the case of Germany

“…Finally, while unemployed members account for only 7% of the DGB unions’ total membership (Dribbusch and Birke, 2014: 4), which is a lower percentage than the share of pensioners, we can only find a positive relationship between weak LMA due to unemployment and union leaving in the descriptive analysis. Once we control for firm-level characteristics including contract type, sector and firm size before unemployment, previous findings which have linked unemployment and union leaving cannot be confirmed for the German context.…”

“…With regard to the LMA classes, for both men and women the multivariate model shows – not surprisingly – that the strongest predictor for leaving the union is detachment from the labour market. Still, it is worthwhile noting here that 20% of the union membership in the DGB affiliated unions consist of pensioners (Dribbusch and Birke, 2014: 4). It might appear at a first glance that unions should probably not worry too much about losing members who retire as their future lies in attracting and retaining young members rather than having pensioners among their membership.…”

Transnational Labour Solidarity and Social Movement Unionism: Insights from and beyond a Women Workers' Strike in Turkey

“…In the relevant case of Germany, for instance, IG BCE has maintained a strong commitment to ‘social partnership’, while IG Metall and ver.di have increasingly pursued a strategy of ‘ “countervailing power”[both] against employers and government alike’ (Addison et al. 2007: 16), and together with other social movements (Dribbusch and Schulten 2008: 191–2).…”

“…), IG BCE has an integrative (rather than oppositional) socio‐political orientation, and a national (rather than international) scale‐of‐operation orientation. In consequence, international labour solidarity is secondary to its pursuit of social partnership in Germany (Dribbusch and Schulten 2008), and it can therefore not be expected to engage in solidarity actions that can undermine existing partnerships and/or its image as a reliable ‘social partner’. While this does not rule out the establishment of GFAs and GCNs, it does rule out efforts to establish both GFAs through adversarial public campaigns and GCNs conceived in oppositional terms.…”

Beyond ‘political economism’: New identities for unions in Western Europe?

“…The partnership agenda has involved unions forming productivity coalitions with employers to improve business efficiency and social pacts with governments to ensure that income levels do not hamper competitiveness (Prabhaker, 2003;Upchurch, 2008). The "Third Way" reorientation is evident amongst sections of the German trade unions (such as IG BCE -the mining, energy and chemical workers" union) (Dribbusch and Schulten, 2008). In the UK, it has been manifested in developments such as the establishment of the TUC "Partnership Institute" and New Labour government support for "Union Learning…”