What happened this summer? In less than two months, I worked in Berlin, Dresden, Zwickau, Eisenach, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Jena, Erfurt and Hamburg. The work mainly consisted of giving talks, visiting libraries and conducting research interviews.

It became clear that the German pattern of industrial relations is falling apart under the pressure of competition, both global and domestic, In the automotive industry, I observed chronic concession bargaining and union busting. Half of the workforce at one assembly plant worked in outsourced service jobs with no works council representation and no collective bargaining.

The reason? The first activist who attempted to set up a works council lost his job. Throughout Germany, whipsawing was more the rule than the exception. Several companies had won lower pay and longer hours for newly hired workers by threatening to invest in other, mostly German, plants. At one plant, the works council had negotiated concessions worth 50m euros per year without facing a concrete threat; workers simply wanted to have an even “playing field” for future investment decisions.

German unions, however, are also experimenting with strategies beyond concession bargaining. In Hamburg, for example, a coalition of unions, political parties and community groups have been battling the privatization of the public hospitals.

As the conservative government has pushed privatization through, the community has turned the battle into a bigger fight for more government accountability and transparence. At the discount retailer Lidl, the service union ver.di is engaged in an organizing campaign in a firm with almost no worker representation. They too have built a broad coalition.

In the construction industry, the German union IG BAU has established the European Migrant Workers Union (EMWU) to support workers from throughout Europe who run into problems in Germany. Activists hope to expand EMWU to more sectors, to win support from other national unions, and to some day establish transnational collective bargaining for Europe’s increasingly mobile workforce.

What this means is still a matter of controversy. My view – which is not widely accepted by German industrial relations scholars is that the worker-friendly aspects of German capitalism have become, in the eyes of most employers and political parties, an unacceptable drag on competitiveness.

A growing number of trade unionists also view existing strategies, inherited from an earlier era of social partnership, as obsolete, and are looking for alternatives.

- Ian Greer